rs 


UC-NRLF 


I          ••'U:-ro 


Jfl|i;n.  ""''jWlirll^n  I? 'ill  88 1  ll !» ID  II  fi  pi 

211  ilSJ'ii 


Library 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

DEPARTMENT  OF  CIVIL  ENGINEERING 

BERKELEY.  CALIFORNIA 


1  O EVEN  one-thousandths, 
^  three  one- thousandths t 
one  one -thousandth  —  one 
record  after  another  was 
passed. 

At  last  a  wire  was  drawn 
that  measured  one  four- 
thousandth  of  an  inch  in 
diameter — twelve  times  finer 
than  the  hair  on  your  head. 

The  spider ,  so  long  counted 
a  master  workman,  had  been 
outdone." 


JOHN  A.  ROEBLING 

FOUNDER  OF  JOHN  A.  ROEBLING'S  SONS  COMPANY 


OUTSPINNING 
THE    SPIDER 


THE  STORY  OF  WIRE 
AND    WIRE    ROPE 


BY 

JOHN  KlMBERLY  MUMFORD 


PUBLISHED     BY 

ROBERT  L.  STILLSON  Co. 

NEW  YORK 


1       *  1    "     2    -"'o0*    r      <* 

'•a*        *  V   2X-°2«,,- 


Copyright,  1921,  6y 

ROBERT  L.  STILLSON  COMPANY 
NEW  YORK 


OUTSPINNING  THE  SPIDER 

CHAPTER  I 
WIRE  AND  MODERN  LIFE 

It  is  the  wire  age. 

Modern  life,  in  all  its  intricate  bearings,  runs 
on  wire.  Wire  everywhere;  in  the  heavens 
above,  the  earth  beneath  and  the  waters  under 
the  earth.  In  all  the  legerdemain  of  science, 
which  has  put  nature  in  bondage,  wire  is  the 
indispensable  agent. 

A  curious,  slow,  finical  little  trade  at  which 
the  smiths  of  forgotten  races  toiled  and 
pottered  and  ruined  their  eyesight  for  unnum- 
bered thousands  of  years  has  become,  within 
less  than  a  century,  under  the  spur  of  modern 
need  and  modern  driving  power,  the  pack- 
bearer  of  the  world  and  the  mainspring  of 
every  activity  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave. 

Wire  still  makes  toys  and  gewgaws  as  it 
always  did,  but  it  is  no  longer  the  plaything  of 

[5] 

793310 


*\         *          i\       d     "»  ^ 

OPTS   PINNING         THE        SPIDER 

vanity  alone.  Cancel  wire  and  wire  rope  and 
their  concomitant,  ''flat  wire,"  from  the  in- 
ventory of  human  assets  tomorrow,  and  the 
world  would  stop  stock-still. 

WIRE  AND  THE 
COMMUTER 

This  is  not  hyperbole.  Picture  yourself  start- 
ing for  business  in  the  morning  if  there  were  no 
wire  and  see  what  the  verdict  would  be  by 
quitting  time.  Considering  the  vital  part  that 
wire  plays  in  the  growing  and  transportation 
of  food  for  man  and  beast,  it  is  likely  you  would 
go  breakfastless  after  sleeping  on  a  bed  without 
springs  or  the  luxury  of  a  woven  wire  mattress. 
But  that  would  be  only  the  beginning  of  sorrow. 
The  trolley  would  stand  dead.  Perhaps  you 
are  a  commuter  and  journey  to  town  by  steam 
road.  The  ferry  would  hug  its  slip,  and  where 
is  the  railroader  who  in  these  days  of  conges- 
tion and  short  headway  would  dare  to  send  a 
train  out  without  the  protection  of  the  little 
lengths  of  bonding  wire  between  the  rails,  that 
articulate  the  block  signal  system? 

You  could  telephone  the  office?  How  and 
over  what  unless  wire  were  used?  Wireless? 
Without  the  coils  and  armatures  that  keep  the 
instruments  going  or  the  aerials  that  seize  the 

[6] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


WITHOUT  WIRE— NO  WIRELESS 


[7] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

word  wave  in  its  flight,  there  would  be  no 
wireless. 

Suppose  you  managed  to  get  there.  With- 
out wire  rope  no  insurance  company  would 
let  an  elevator  get  higher  than  the  second  story, 
and  you  couldn't  signal  the  elevator  anyway, 
for  the  annunciator  operates  only  by  an  in- 
genious system  of  wires,  and  the  control  is  even 
more  complex. 

You  can  climb  the  stairs,  but  the  door  key 
is  flat  wire  and  the  shank  on  which  the  knob 
turns  is  square  wire  and  half  the  lock  is  wire. 
More  trouble.  The  buttons  on  your  suit  are 
flat  wire;  so  are  your  garters.  As  for  the  stenog- 
rapher, if  she  got  there  at  all — for  she  is  as 
completely  wired  as  a  telegraph  system,  from 
her  hat  to  her  shoes— the  index  files  and  office 
books  and  letter  hooks  and  much  of  the  other 
equipment  of  the  office  would  fall  to  pieces 
without  wire,  and  the  machine  which  is  her 
pride  and  the  symbol  of  her  dominion  is  about 
all  wire  of  one  kind  or  another,  except  the  frame. 

Distinctly,  it  would  not  be  your  busy  day. 
You  might  spend  it  looking  out  of  the  window 
at  the  ships  going  down  the  river,  but  un- 
happily, the  majestic  liner  is  compact  of  wire, 
from  her  glistening  trucks  to  the  deepest 

[8] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

shadows  of  the  engine  room;  or  airplanes  soaring 
and  swaying  above  the  teeming  town  and  far- 
stretched  waterways.  But  an  airplane  lives  by 
wire.  It  could  neither  fly  nor  steer  nor  even 
hold  together  if  its  frame  were  not  strung  with 
wire  and  its  wings  and  ailerons  and  fuselage 
bound  and  braced  and  its  machinery  vitalized 
by  divers  forms  of  wire  and  wire  strand  and 
woven  wire  cord. 

Far  over  the  town  and  across  the  Jerseys  you 
would  see  columns  of  smoke  rising  from  busy 
factories— save  that  the  mines  of  coal  and  the 
wells  of  oil  are  both  dependent  for  every  atom 
of  their  product  on  wire  rope,  and  the  lumber 
and  metals  which  are  the  bases  of  industrial 
manufacture  are  in  the  same  boat.  And  as  for 
electric  light — you  might  linger  till  dark  but 
turning  the  switch  wouldn't  help,  for  the  big 
subterranean  cables  and  the  multitude  of  littler 
wires  that  make  a  pathway  for  the  current, 
even  the  dynamos  with  their  masses  of  wire, 
they  were  all  dead  long  ago. 

Gas?  Made  of  coal  and  oil.  There  would 
be  nothing  left  to  do  but  to  grope  hungry 
through  dark  streets  and,  if  you  could  find  a 
wireless  bridge,  go  back  to  Lonelyhurst,  where 
you  would  learn  that  without  wire  there  is  no 

[9] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

domestic  joy  in  this  earthly  tabernacle,  for 
from  cellar  to  roof,  from  the  bale  and  rim  of 
the  coal-scuttle  and  the  binding  of  the  broom, 
from  the  cooking  pots,  the  dishpan  and  all 
other  culinary  utensils  to  the  baby's  toys  and 
mother's  corset  and  hairpins  and  needles  and 
safety  pins  and  pins,  it  is  all  wire  one  way  or 
another.  The  family  would  never  know  what 
time  you  got  home,  for  the  watches  and  clocks 
are  largely  wire;  and  there  would  be  no  possible 
relief  in  going  to  the  club,  for  nobody  would 
have  a  car  that  would  run— or  a  cork-screw, 
even  in  the  dark. 

WIRE  HOLDS 

THE  WORLD  TOGETHER 

It  is  wire  that  has  brought  the  world  together 
and  holds  it  together,  and  when  the  wire  mills 
stop,  as  even  they  would  have  to  do  if  there 
were  no  wire,  modern  civilization  might  as 
well  be  dead,  and  it  would  be.  Even  war 
would  peter  out.  Populations  might  perish 
from  hunger  and  probably  would,  but  they'd 
have  to  stop  killing  each  other  except  by 
primitive  methods,  for  without  wire,  which 
controls  the  movement  of  ships  and  airplanes 
and  submarines,  and  permits  by  telegraph  and 
telephone  the  maneuvering  of  prodigious  armies 

[10] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  binds  the  shining  bodies  of  great  guns 
and  makes  most  of  the  instruments  of  pre- 
cision for  aiming  them,  war  would  no  longer 
offer  much  chance  for  machine-made  glory. 
As  a  guarantee  of  perpetual  and  world-wide 
peace  no  League  of  Nations  could  begin  to 
compare  with  the  elimination  of  wire  from  the 
world's  catalogue  of  weapons. 

Wire  is  an  influential  member  of  that  family 
of  material  giants  which  have  come  into  great- 
ness within  a  relatively  short  time  but  which 
none  the  less  weigh  heavily  in  the  destinies  of 
mankind.  It  is  old,  too,  but  until  a  new  demon 
of  material  ambition  began  to  stir  in  crowding 
populations  it  had  little  purpose  except  to  adorn 
the  raiment  of  the  great  or  add  richness  to 
ancient  arts.  People  whose  vision  of  man's 
past  is  bounded  by  the  encyclopedia  have 
been  told  times  enough  that  Aaron's  robe  had 
gold  wire  threads  in  it,  that  there  was  wire  in 
the  pyramids,  that  Nineveh  was  beating  out 
wire  eight  hundred  years  before  the  tragedy  of 
Calvary,  and  that  metal  heads  with  hair  of 
wire  were  found  in  the  ruins  of  Herculaneum 
and  are  now  again  entombed  in  the  showcases 
of  the  Portici  Museum. 

mi 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

THE  AGE-LONG 
USE  OF  WIRE 

In  a  world  chasing  the  present  and  future 
dollar  ethnology  moves  slowly;  the  encyclopedias 
have  not  yet  told  that  pre-Inca  Peru,  hiding  in 
its  tombs  the  secrets  of  a  vanished  civilization, 
has  now  given  up  garments  gleaming  with  woven 
metal,  which  show  their  makers  to  have  been 
past  masters  ages  ago  in  the  wire-beater's  art, 
and  to  have  spun  the  wire  on  woolen  filaments 
in  the  self  same  way  of  lamination  in  which 
Paris  does  it  for  the  uniforms  of  haughty  major 
generals  today. 

And  yet,  down  to  the  century  when  the 
popes  were  ruling  from  Avignon,  when  Rienzi 
was  raising  hob  in  the  streets  of  Rome  and 
titles  of  nobility  were  being  won  on  the  bloody 
fields  of  Crecy  and  Poictiers  and  Bannockburn, 
none  of  the  many  metal  workers,  through  all 
the  ages  and  in  all  the  lands,  ever  had  a  notion 
he  could  draw  metal  through  a  die  to  make  a 
wire.  They  hammered  and  hammered  through 
the  ages  and  sliced  the  filaments  off  as  a  cobbler 
cuts  leather  shoestrings— or  used  to.  And  then 
it  was  a  German  that  did  it,  for  the  ancient 
records  of  Nuremberg  and  Augsberg  tell  of  a 
"wire  drawer"  and  later  on  one  Rudolf  had  a 

[12] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

wire  mill  at  Nuremberg.  The  chances  are  that 
Rudolf  was  a  capitalist  and  that  the  inventor 
sold  him  the  invention  for  a  pot  of  beer,  and 
grumbled  for  the  rest  of  his  medieval  days 
after  the  manner  of  his  kind. 

Six  centuries  have  gone  since  then,  and  in  a 
world  of  wire  it  is  safe  to  say,  on  the  strength 
of  some  inquiry,  that  ninety  per  cent  of  the 
people  whose  lives  and  well  being  hang  on  wire 
from  one  year's  end  to  another  have  no  more 
knowledge  of  how  drawn  wire  is  made  than  the 
Egyptian  who  hammered  out  his  quota  in  the 
days  of  old  Rameses. 

THE  BEGINNING  OF  THE 
WIRE  AGE 

England  and  France,  quick  to  see  what  the 
process  m,eant,  even  to  the  slow  commerce  of 
those  times,  fussed  away  for  another  three 
hundred  years,  trying  to  perfect  methods  of 
wire  drawing  to  the  point  of  independence  in 
the  trade,  but  it  was  a  stern  chase.  "Iron 
wire,"  for  all  utility  wire  in  the  beginning  was 
drawn  from  Swedish  iron,  was  beginning  to 
take  up  a  share  of  the  white  man's  burden. 
Gold  and  silver  and  platinum  and  bronze  were 
still  favored  in  ornamental  use,  but  for  prac- 
tical purposes  iron  refused  to  be  displaced. 

[13] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

Great  Britain  essayed  in  1750  the  making  of 
wire  from  steel  for  musical  purposes,  but  to 
1769  Broadwood  was  still  sticking  to  German 
iron  and  even  in  1790  was  still  buying  wire  from 
Pohlman  in  Nuremberg.  So  Bavaria,  where 
first  the  idea  of  drawing  metal  had  been  hatched, 
was  still  leading  the  world  in  its  craft. 

Little  by  little,  for  the  tide  of  industrial 
activity  had  barely  begun  to  rise,  new  uses 
were  found  for  wire.  In  one  field  after  another 
it  supplanted  vegetable  fibre  where  strength 
and  durability  were  essential.  As  the  world 
began  to  feel  the  Nineteenth  Century  surge 
of  mechanical  impulse,  as  life  developed  new 
facets  and  new  needs,  science  sought  new  means 
of  meeting  them,  and  in  the  quest  itself  grew. 
Producing  methods  advanced  with  the  new 
demands  of  invention.  Always  the  wire  makers 
spun  their  filaments  a  little  finer.  Men  were 
weighing  zephyrs  and  measuring  the  infini- 
tesimal, and  needed  tools  of  increasing  delicacy. 
Wire  was  the  answer. 

Electricity,  so  long  hidden  from  under- 
standing, was  led  captive  by  a  wire,  not  by  a 
chain— and  with  its  development  wire  has 
found  a  new  and  increasingly  important  role. 
The  ductility  of  metals  was  at  last  being  tested 

[14] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


DREDGING 


15] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

to  the  full.  Seven  one-thousandths,  three  one- 
thousandths,  one  one-thousandth  —  one  record 
after  another  was  passed.  At  last,  by  way 
of  curiosity,  a  wire  was  drawn  that  measured 
one  four-thousandth  of  an  inch  in  diameter — 
twelve  times  finer  than  the  hair  on  your  head. 
The  spider,  so  long  counted  a  master  workman, 
had  been  undone. 

The  wire  age  was  arriving— big  wires  to 
carry  the  world's  heavy  loads;  fine  wire  to 
solve  its  molecular  problems.  The  day  of  the 
hammer  was  done. 


[16] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  PIONEER 

Since  Columbus  the  centuries  have  been 
gathering  speed.  At  first  it  came  slowly,  for 
the  need  was  not  yet.  Today  a  thought  is 
born  and  tomorrow  it  is  a  giant,  parting  seas 
and  moving  mountains.  The  waste  of  yester- 
day is  turned  into  the  raw  material  of  new 
manufacture,  with  its  million  wheels  moving 
faster  and  faster.  But  back  of  it  all,  inevitably 
and  eternally,  is  a  busy  human  brain  and  un- 
satisfied energy. 

Wire  rope  had  lingered,  waiting  for  civili- 
zation's loads  to  grow.  The  artisans  of  old 
had  woven  cut  wires  together  to  make  the 
trinkets  of  their  time,  little  dreaming  of  the 
might  that  lay  hidden  in  the  fibres  of  the  iron, 
and  their  world  went  on  hoisting  stone  for  its 
pyramids  by  prodigious  multiplication  of  garlic- 
fed  man-power.  It  seems  strange  to  the  high- 
speed mind  of  today  that  five  hundred  years 
could  have  passed,  after  the  drawing  of  wire 
was  invented,  before  necessity  put  it  into  the 

[17] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

mind  of  a  wire-drawer  that  with  wire,  as  with 
other  things,  strength  lay  in  union.  And  yet 
the  human  race  had  been  making  rope  since 
the  morning  stars  sang  together. 

In  1831,  when  France  was  picking  herself  up 
from  the  dirt  and  disorder  of  another  revolution 
and  the  German  princes  were  strangling  in  the 
universities  the  growing  call  for  "liberty  and 
union,"  young  men  of  brains  and  ambition 
began  to  leave  the  German  states  for  America, 
where  there  was  free  air  and  elbow  room. 

JOHN  A.  ROEBLING 
COMES  TO  AMERICA 

In  a  company  of  such,  John  A.  Roebling 
journeyed  from  Muhlhausen  in  Saxony,  and 
took  up  a  tract  of  land  in  western  Pennsylvania. 
He  carried  a  degree  of  civil  engineer  from  the 
Royal  University  in  Berlin;  but  there  were 
"back-to-the-landers"  even  in  those  days,  and 
he  set  about  farming  in  the  thrifty  German  way, 
founding  for  nucleus  a  little  town  which  at 
first  was  named  Germania,  but  afterward  came 
to  be  called  Saxonburg. 

Fate  seems  to  have  ordained  that  Roebling' s 
engineering  skill  should  not  remain  fettered  to  a 
Pennsylvania  plow  handle.  The  system  of 
canals  and  portages  which  afterward  evolved 

[18] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  merged  and  built  itself  into  the  Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad  was  digging  its  ditches  and  dams 
and  building  haulways  through  the  obstinate 
distances  of  that  hard-ribbed  state,  past  the 
hopeful  hamlet  of  Saxonburg  and  fatefully  under 
the  eyes  of  the  young  German  engineer.  The 
result  was  never  in  doubt.  He  abandoned  the 
plow  to  his  compatriots  and  plunged  into  the 
problems  of  construction,  where  he  belonged. 

HAULING  CANAL  BOATS 
UP  THE  PORTAGE  RAILWAY 

The  skeptic  who  scoffs  at  fatalism  will  find 
it  difficult  to  explain  why  the  particular  en- 
gineering work  that  was  brought  to  Roebling's 
door  should  involve  the  weary  hauling  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Canal's  boats  up  the  Portage 
Railway,  which  Bertrand,  one  of  Napoleon's 
generals,  had  built  to  overcome  the  Pennsyl- 
vania ridges;  or  why,  just  as  the  bulk  and 
clumsiness  and  inefficiency  of  the  huge  hemp 
cables  were  eating  into  his  active  mind,  a 
casual  paper  from  Germany  should  convey  the 
fact  that  some  fellow  in  Freiburg  in  Saxony— 
where  wire  drawing  had  birth — had  made  a 
strong  rope  by  twisting  wires  together. 

What  man  had  done  man  could  do.    If  there 
was  a  place  to  test  the  efficacy  of  wire  rope  with 

[19] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

its  increased  strength  and  diminishing  size,  it 
was  the  Portage  Railway.  So  the  Saxonburg 
wheatfield  was  turned  into  a  ropewalk.  Ceres 
made  way  for  Vulcan.  The  neighbors,  as  soon 
as  material  could  be  shipped  in  from  the  Falls 
of  the  Beaver  River,  where  wire  drawing  was 
done,  found  themselves  under  young  Roebling's 
direction  twisting  wires,  with  rude  appliances 
for  torsion,  into  a  fabric  which  had  never  been 
made  or  seen  or  probably  heard  of  in  America 
before,  but  which  was  destined,  in  a  com- 
paratively short  time,  to  change  the  face  of 
industry. 

WIRE  ROPE  PROVES 
ITS  PULLING  POWER 

It  is  easy  to  imagine  the  caustic  comments  of 
the  Pennsylvania  countryside,  and  the  fore- 
bodings with  which  the  pioneer  installed  his 
cables  on  what  was  then  a  conspicuous  engineer- 
ing labor.  But  it  worked.  Engineering  audacity, 
plus  scientific  skill  and  native  faculty  for  doing 
things,  solved  the  problem  of  the  Portage,  but 
it  did  far  more  than  that.  The  fame  of  it  was 
sown  broadcast  and  the  orders  for  wire  rope 
came  flooding  from  all  that  fast  opening  country. 
Roebling  had  found  his  job.  Destiny  had  him 
by  the  collar  and  he  bade  farming  good-bye. 

[20] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


HOISTING  A  BATTLESHIP  TOWER  WITH  WIRE  ROPE 


21] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

It  was  in  1840  that  the  first  Roebling  rope 
was  finished.  Eight  years  later,  the  year  when 
the  revolution  burst  forth  in  the  Teutonic 
empires,  he  moved  his  plant  and  its  business 
to  Trenton,  and  began  forthwith  to  build  the 
foremost  wire  rope  factory  in  the  world. 

Nothing  can  be  more  amusing  or  reveal  more 
clearly  what  brains  and  energy  have  been  able 
to  accomplish  in  the  arena  of  American  oppor- 
tunity than  to  contrast  the  picture  of  the 
first  Roebling  factory  in  Trenton,  which  sug- 
gests the  rudest  of  farmsteads,  with  the  sky- 
piercing  chimneys  and  the  mile  or  more  of 
many-windowed  brick  buildings  in  and  around 
the  Jersey  capital  today,  where  the  Roebling 
work  is  done. 

The  three  big  factory  groups  which  have 
grown  from  the  shabby  little  buildings  of  1848 
are  the  fruit  of  intelligence  and  ceaseless  en- 
deavor, but  they  are  reared  primarily  on  a 
basis  of  manufacturing  honor,  and  ruled  by 
the  general  thesis  that  forever  and  ever  quality 
comes  before  price.  This  means  keeping  faith 
with  the  structural  iron  worker,  swinging  pigmy- 
small  five  hundred  feet  above  the  din  of  the 
city  streets;  with  the  sailor,  the  miner,  the 
rigger;  with  the  hurrying  multitude  that  packs 

[22] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

the  elevators  in  tall  buildings,  and  with  the 
aviator,  to  whom  a  breaking  wire  may  spell 
death. 

That  is  the  reason  the  Roebling  Company 
has  outgrown  the  limits  of  Trenton  in  the  last 
decade  and  a  half  and  with  its  overflow  founded 
a  city  of  its  own;  that  is  the  reason  why 
Roebling  has  almost  got  into  the  Thesaurus  as  a 
synonym  for  wire  in  every  civilized  language 
under  the  sun. 

It  is  wire,  from  the  huge  three -inch  cable 
that  pulls  the  loads  of  mountain  haulways 
or  moves  the  thousand  cars  of  a  city  transit 
system,  down  to  the  gossamer  that  jingles  the 
bell  in  the  telephone  or  the  infinitesimal  hair 
that  in  the  eyepiece  of  a  telescope  helps  the 
astronomer  to  mark  the  movement  of  a  distant 
world.  There  is  hardly  a  thing  in  the  nature 
of  wire,  round,  flat  or  irregular,  that  the 
Roeblings  do  not  manufacture  or  have  not  at 
some  time  manufactured,  whether  for  the  world's 
standard  uses  or  the  numberless  special  pur- 
poses hidden  in  inventive  minds. 

A  TWELVE  MILLION  POUND  DEVELOPMENT 
FROM  A  FIFTY  POUND  BEGINNING 

"I've  come  to  see,"  said  an  old  man  at  the 
Roebling  offices  one  day,  "if  you'd  go  to  the 

[23] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

trouble  on  a  very  small  order  to  find  out  just 
what  composition  I  need  in  a  wire  for  a  patent 
I've  got." 

And  they  did.  It  took  the  chemists  and  the 
experts  some  time  to  work  out  the  problem  of 
resistances,  and  the  old  man  ordered  fifty  pounds. 
The  next  year  he  ordered  a  hundred  more. 
There  was  no  profit  in  it,  but  they  made  it  and 
looked  pleasant.  They  were  specialists  in  wire 
and  they  were  simply  keeping  faith  with  their 
job. 

The  following  year  the  visitor  called  again. 
"I  don't  want  any  more  of  that  wire,"  he 
grinned,  "I've  sold  my  patent  to  So-and-So," 
naming  one  of  the  biggest  manufacturing  con- 
cerns in  the  world,  "but  I  want  to  see  some 
royalties  and  I  made  it  a  condition  of  the  sale 
that  they  order  this  wire  from  you  on  the  for- 
mula that  I  got." 

In  a  recent  12  months  period  Roeblings 
fabricated  more  than  5,000,000  pounds  of  that 
wire. 


If  it's  wire,  the  Roeblings  make  it.    All  that 
was  in  the  mind  of  the  man  who  seventy  years 

[24] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

ago  was  twisting  the  first  rope  in  Saxonburg. 
He  was  more  than  an  engineer;  he  was  a  sane 
and  far-seeing  mind  in  business.  As  soon  as 
possible  after  establishing  the  factory  in  Trenton 
he  added  a  mill  for  the  manufacture  of  his  own 
wire.  It  gave  him  a  product  that  he  knew  from 
the  pig  iron  up,  and  it  saved  a  profit,  besides 
extending  to  a  marked  degree  the  scope  of  the 
business.  He  knew,  when  he  put  the  cable  on 
the  Portage  haulway  in  1840,  that  the  mission 
of  wire,  in  the  world  that  was  then  making, 
would  be  boundless,  and  from  the  very  start 
he  was  the  explorer  in  new  fields  for  wire,  a 
builder,  a  seeker  for  problems  that  wire  might 
solve,  archapostle  of  the  power  of  wire,  in  one 
form  or  another,  to  do  the  heaviest  labor  of 
mankind. 

Wire  rope,  spreading  its  field  of  utility  ever 
wider  and  wider,  carried  with  ease  and  safety 
loads  that  had  broken  the  back  of  hemp;  it 
took  the  place  of  solid  steel  in  numerous  phases 
of  construction,  and  when  its  adaptability  was 
proven  new  tasks  were  devised  for  it.  Wire 
rope  was  the  forerunner  of  "Safety  First."  It 
cancelled  large  burdens  of  expense;  it  set  a  new 
record  in  facility  of  construction. 

[25] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

AMERICA'S  FIRST 
WIRE  CABLEWAY 

Persistently  militant,  from  the  day  of  his 
first  achievement,  in  the  promotion  of  wire  rope, 
John  A.  Roebling  was  the  first  engineer  to  intro- 
duce into  America  the  novelty  of  a  wire  cable- 
way,  which  with  an  ingenious  carriage  he  em- 
ployed to  transport  across  a  river  the  materials 
he  needed  in  the  construction  of  a  bridge.  This 
method  of  haulage,  over  streams  and  gorges, 
down  from  high  mountains  to  cars  or  boats  in 
the  valley  below,  up  from  the  deep-sunken  beds 
of  rich  placers— everywhere  and  in  all  sorts  of 
places  where  Nature  seemed  to  have  set  up 
impassable  defense  against  those  who  would 
take  away  her  treasures — came  forthwith  into 
widespread  use,  and  is  among  the  handy  tools 
of  engineers  throughout  the  world  today.  The 
Roebling  Company  established  these  cable- 
ways  in  many  countries.  It  had  in  operation 
around  the  globe  no  less  than  twenty  different 
types,  including  log  rigs  and  gravity  planes  for 
mountain  railways,  and  the  demand  for  wire 
rope  was  increased  thereby  a  thousand  fold 
before  the  new  century  had  come  in. 

[26] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

ROEBLING  TURNS  HIS 
ATTENTION  TO  BRIDGES 

The  age  of  wire  was  marching  rapidly,  but 
John  A.  Roebling  had  set  a  distant  mark.  In 
the  mountains  of  Peru,  India  and  other  lands 
for  ages  the  natives  have  made  use  of  bridges 
made  of  vines,  to  cross  appalling  chasms.  As 
time  went  on  and  arts  progressed  the  principle 
was  applied  through  the  agency  of  hemp  ropes 
and  chains,  and  men  of  small  imagination 
thought  that  in  these  the  limit  had  been  at- 
tained. But  Roebling's  faith  was  as  the  faith 
of  the  Moslem  in  the  Prophet.  He  believed 
that  in  wire  the  solution  of  all  the  pesky  prob- 
lems of  bridge-building  had  been  found.  In  a 
small  way  the  thing  was  obvious,  but  his  ambi- 
tion never  stopped  there.  He  believed,  and  had 
believed  ever  since  he  made  the  first  rope,  that 
a  major  bridge  made  up  of  wires  of  scrupu- 
lously high  quality,  constructed  with  rigorous 
regard  for  scientific  tenets,  would  carry  with 
ease  and  indefinitely  any  reasonable  traffic  that 
might  be  imposed  on  it. 

Famous  engineers  said  he  was  a  visionary 
and  a  hobbyist;  still  with  force  and  tenacity  he 
urged  his  contention  until  at  last  the  engineer- 
ing world  was  compelled  to  give  heed  to  him. 

[27] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

In  the  face  of  such  opposition,  and  in  view  of 
the  centuries  that  had  dragged  by  before  wires 
were  twisted  into  rope,  it  is  remarkable  that  so 
soon  after  his  initial  experiment  he  should  have 
worked  out  in  practical  entirety  the  plan  of 
bridge  construction  which  came  to  its  climax 
in  the  spanning  of  the  East  River.  .- 

Between  1840,  when  he  made  his  first  rope, 
and  1844,  he  had  not  only  perfected  his  theory 
of  wire  bridges  but  in  spite  of  furious  opposi- 
tion had  built  one  as  an  aqueduct  for  the  old 
Pennsylvania  Canal,  the  basins  of  which  were 
at  Pittsburg.  This  was  followed  by  four  more 
suspension  aqueducts  for  the  Delaware  and 
Hudson  Canal  Co.  Having  espoused  a  theory 
he  let  no  grass  grow  under  his  feet.  He  cast 
about  vigorously  for  bridges  to  build.  He  found 
an  opening  in  Cincinnati. 

THE  OHIO  RIVER  BRIDGE 
AT  CINCINNATI 

River  traffic  along  the  Ohio,  in  the  forties, 
was  still  a  big  factor  in  business  but  was  con- 
testing tooth  and  nail  the  advance  of  the  rail- 
ways, and  fought  bitterly  against  the  right  of 
the  invaders  to  build  bridges  over  the  water- 
ways. The  steamboat  men  said  bridge  piers 

[28] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 


LOGGING— HANDLING  BIG  FELLOWS  WITH  WIRE  ROPE 


[29) 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

would  be  a  peril  to  navigation,  but  the  cities  of 
Cincinnati  and  Covington,  facing  each  other 
across  the  river,  cried  for  the  bridge.  The 
rivermen  were  on  top  in  1846  when  Roebling 
came  along,  fresh  from  the  building  of  the  wire 
bridge  in  Pennsylvania  and  with  his  head  full 
of  wire  bridges,  and  offered  to  throw  a  wire 
span  across  the  Ohio  with  a  length  of  1057  feet 
and  a  floor  height  above  the  water  of  103  feet. 
For  just  ten  years  the  steamboat  faction 
staved  it  off.  It  was  not  begun  till  1856,  just 
after  the  Niagara  Bridge  was  opened.  The 
panic  of  1857  and  then  the  Civil  War  kept  the 
project  at  a  standstill  until  1863.  On  Easter 
Day  in  1867  the  bridge  was  opened.  Colonel 
Washington  A.  Roebling,  son  of  the  pioneer, 
was  the  first  to  cross  on  its  cable.  In  the  mean- 
time John  A.  Roebling  had  completed  not  alone 
the  Niagara  Bridge,  but  the  Alleghany  Bridge 
over  the  Alleghany  River  at  Pittsburg.  The 
last  named  differed  from  the  Niagara,  Ohio  and 
later  East  River  bridges  in  that  it  had  several 
piers  in  the  streamway,  after  the  manner  of  the 
old  type  structures,  but  in  principle  it  conformed 
to  the  plan  which  had  been  in  his  mind  from  the 
beginning.  His  son,  Washington,  was  his  only 
assistant. 

[30] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

BRIDGING 
NIAGARA  GORGE 

In  all  the  world,  perhaps,  no  place  could  have 
been  found  where  the  building  of  a  simon  pure 
"Suspension  Bridge"  would  have  been  a  more 
spectacular  accomplishment  than  over  Niagara 
Gorge,  with  the  Falls  thundering  a  little  way 
upstream,  and  the  waters  lashing  and  fuming 
underneath;  no  place  where  its  slender  beauty 
could  have  had  such  stern  and  impressive  back- 
ground. The  idea  of  carrying  railroad  trains 
over  that  turmoil  of  waters  on  a  web  apparently 
so  frail,  evoked  a  storm  of  protest  from  well- 
nigh  all  the  foremost  engineers  of  the  time. 
But  Roebling  was  a  practical  man  as  well  as  a 
stubborn  one.  After  all,  he  was  dealing  with 
rock  and  wire  and  he  knew  what  they  would  do. 
He  built  the  bridge,  the  first  of  its  kind  to  carry 
railroad  traffic.  All  the  world  of  that  day  knew, 
but  most  of  it  now  has  forgotten,  how  he  flew 
a  kite  across  the  gorge  to  get  his  first  wire  over, 
and  from  that  built  up  his  cables.  On  March 
16,  1855,  the  first  train  passed  over  it.  With 
one  remodeling  it  continued  to  carry  increas- 
ingly heavy  loads  until  nearly  half  a  century 
later  it  was  replaced  by  a  larger  structure, 
better  calculated  to  bear  the  burden  of  modern 
equipment. 

131} 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

THE  "SUSPENSION  BRIDGE" 
PROVES  ITSELF 

"Suspension  Bridge"  not  alone  proved  itself 
in  point  of  service,  but  it  demonstrated  the 
soundness  of  Mr.  Roebling's  claims  for  the  wire 
structure.  The  Ohio  structure,  which  followed, 
outdid  Suspension  Bridges  in  length  of  span;  in 
economy  of  material,  in  simplicity  and  charm 
of  outline  it  clearly  foreshadowed  the  still 
greater  work,  the  designing  of  which  was  to  be 
the  crowning  accomplishment  of  his  life.  He 
was  working  with  a  practiced  hand  now.  The 
doubts,  if  he  ever  had  any,  were  behind  him. 
Behind  him,  also,  was  a  producing  plant  tuned 
to  turn  out  at  speed  the  materials  he  needed, 
with  certainty  of  their  quality. 

He  had  proved  that  the  making  of  big  bridges 
with  wire  was  feasible,  and  that  it  was  simple, 
as  most  great  things  are  after  they  have  been 
done.  There  were  only  three  basic  parts  to  a 
suspension  bridge  after  all — towers,  cables  and 
anchorage.  Suspending  the  roadway,  which  to 
the  average  man  seems  the  vital  part  of  the 
creation,  is,  from  the  engineering  standpoint, 
only  an  accessory  work.  John  A.  Roebling  had 
concentrated  his  life's  effort,  not  on  mere 
methods  of  commercial  production,  but  rather 
on  the  proving  of  his  contentions.  He  needed  the 

[32] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

right  kind  of  wire  rope  to  prove  them,  so  like  a 
wise  man  he  made  it  himself. 


He  came  to  the  summit  of  his  achievement 
with  the  acceptance  of  his  plans  for  the  build- 
ing of  the  Brooklyn  Bridge,  and  then,  his  faith 
vindicated,  his  theory,  which  he  had  fought  so 
hard  to  sustain,  endorsed  by  boards  of  noted 
engineers  and  acclaimed  by  the  public,  starting 
out  on  the  realization  of  his  long  dream — the 
building  of  the  Eighth  Wonder  of  the  World, 
a  comparatively  slight  accident,  the  bungled 
docking  of  a  ferryboat,  which  crushed  his  foot 
and  brought  on  tetanus,  put  out  the  steady 
candle  of  his  life. 

It  was  the  very  whimsy  of  fate.  His  work 
was  done.  He  had  created,  out  of  imagination 
and  energy,  the  finished  designs  for  a  wonder 
fabric,  ready  for  the  labor  of  an  intenser  age. 
He  did  not  live  to  see  the  spider  structures  hung 
like  wisps  of  gossamer  above  the  restless  water- 
ways of  New  York,  but  his  name  is  woven  into 
the  very  steel  of  them. 


[33J 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  BROOKLYN  BRIDGE 

Early  in  the  fifties,  when  the  Niagara  ac- 
complishment was  more  or  less  the  talk  of  two 
continents  and  communication  under  seas  by 
cable  had  helped  to  emphasize  the  possibilities 
of  wire,  John  A.  Roebling,  protagonist  of  the  wire 
bridge  idea,  advanced  a  proposal  to  connect 
New  York  and  Long  Island  by  a  suspension 
bridge  and  release  the  people  of  Brooklyn  from 
a  segregation  which  they  had  made  a  somewhat 
futile  pretense  of  enjoying.  Habit  dies  hard. 
The  crust  of  custom  becomes  strangely  indurated 
with  long  exposure,  and  Brooklyn  residents  had 
fought  the  East  River  in  profitable,  if  archaic, 
ferryboats  too  long  to  be  lured  lightly  into  any 
liaison  with  iconoclastic  Manhattan  by  way  of 
a  wire  bridge. 

Roebling  waited  another  decade,  but  he 
hustled  while  he  waited.  The  Brooklynites 
continued  to  make  their  uncertain  ways  across 
the  river  in  times  of  storm  and  tide  and  ice  as 
the  Lord  gave  them  strength,  and  the  sacred 
ferryboats  still  paid  dividends.  The  vicious 

[34] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

winter  of  1866-7,  coldest,  bitterest,  longest  the 
cities  have  ever  known,  wrung  forth  at  last  a 
cry  for  relief.  They  could  wrap  themselves  up 
against  the  weather,  but  no  weight  of  woolens 
could  turn  the  shafts  of  ridicule.  It  was  grand 
ammunition  for  the  advocates  of  the  bridge, 
when  people  traveling  by  train  from  Albany 
actually  reached  New  York  sooner  than  did 
the  man  who  did  business  in  New  York,  and  left 
his  domicilium  in  Brooklyn  at  the  same  hour. 
And  besides,  the  Roebling  cap  had  another 
feather  in  it  now,  in  the  completion  of  the  Ohio 
Bridge.  He  was  building  wire  bridges  every- 
where, and  it  began  to  look  as  though  there 
was  some  body  of  truth  in  the  Western  con- 
tention that  New  York  was  the  most  pro- 
vincial city  in  America,  for  all  its  self-approval. 

At  one  of  the  many  hearings  that  were  held 
on  the  bridge  question  a  famous  engineer  who 
favored  the  wire  type  was  asked  what  reason 
he  had  for  believing  it  would  do  the  work. 

"I  believe  it,"  he  replied,  "because  Roebling 
says  so." 

THE  INITIAL  CHARTER 
GRANTED 

The  demand  for  the  bridge  rose  to  a  clamor. 
In  the  month  of  May,  1867,  the  initial  charter 

[35] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

was  granted,  and  Mr.  Roebling  was  appointed 
engineer.  Three  months  afterward  he  sub- 
mitted his  report  and  estimates,  which  were 
examined  and  approved  by  a  commission  of 
engineers  from  the  United  States  War  Depart- 
ment. Then  he  set  about  preparation  for  the 
task. 

THE  DEATH  OF 
JOHN  A.  ROEBLING 

It  was  while  fixing  the  location  for  the 
Brooklyn  tower  that  he  met  with  the  accident 
that  caused  his  death.  But  his  work  had  been 
well  done,  and  his  son  and  associate,  Col.  Wash- 
ington A.  Roebling,  took  up  without  delay  the 
execution  of  the  plan  he  had  helped  to  create. 

If  the  older  Roebling  encountered  obstacles 
in  bringing  his  great  idea  to  the  point  of  accept- 
ance, the  pathway  of  his  successor,  called  with- 
out warning  to  take  over  responsibility  for  the 
greatest  engineering  labor  of  the  age,  was  not 
strewn  with  roses. 

THE  WORK  OF  CONSTRUCTION 
BEGINS 

It  was  in  the  summer  of  1869  that  John  A. 
Roebling  died.  The  second  day  of  January, 
1870,  saw  the  actual  work  of  construction  be- 
gun, when  laborers  started  to  clear  away  to 

[36] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


WIRE  ROPE     IN  THE  QUARRY 


[37] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

prepare  for  the  foundations  of  the  Brooklyn 
tower.  From  that  day  forward,  through  a 
baker's  dozen  of  years,  there  was  no  rest, 
though  there  was  plenty  of  interruption.  Until 
the  job  was  ended  Washington  A.  Roebling 
simply  lived  the  Brooklyn  Bridge.  It  was  a 
colossal  job,  punctuated  with  changes  and  prob- 
lems and  complications,  but  it  went  forward. 
The  landmarks  of  a  bygone  age,  old  houses  of  his- 
toric memory  on  the  water  fronts  of  both  cities, 
vanished  silently  and  where  they  had  been,  by 
and  by  there  grew  piles  of  masonry  to  form  the 
approaches.  From  the  huge  caissons  over 
against  either  shore  rose  the  towers,  tall  and 
grim,  which  were  to  carry  the  cables.  In  due 
time  they  stood  complete,  with  their  broad 
bases  welded  to  the  rock  by  an  ingenious  bond 
of  stone  and  concrete  in  the  river's  bed,  and 
their  crests  nearly  three  hundred  feet  above  the 
top  of  the  tide.  A  hundred  and  nineteen  feet 
— and  three  inches,  to  be  precise — above  the 
water  opened  the  two  tall  arches  in  each  tower, 
stretching  upward  one  hundred  and  seventeen 
feet  in  air.  It  was  through  these  the  bridge 
proper  was  to  pass,  with  its  gangways  for  horse 
and  foot  and  railway  traffic. 

[38] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

COULD  THOSE  SLENDER  TOWERS 
CARRY  THE  GREAT  LOAD? 

The  hurrying  people  of  New  York  and  Brook- 
lyn watched  the  thing  grow  and  wondered  fear- 
fully whether  the  slender  towers  would  stand 
the  strain.  In  Harper's  Magazine  for  May, 
1883,  now  itself  yellowed  by  age,  is  an  exhaus- 
tive article  concerning  the  Brooklyn  Bridge,  in 
which  one  is  told  at  length  and  with  an  en- 
gineer's exactness,  the  steps  by  which  the 
achievement  was  brought,  after  thirteen  labor- 
ious years,  to  proud  completion. 

Even  to  the  curious  layman  the  details  are 
no  longer  of  insistent  interest.  One  thing  is 
emphasized,  however,  which  well  as  we  know 
it  now  can  never  cease  to  hold  the  mind  in  a 
certain  wonder — that  all  the  weight  and  solid- 
ity and  massiveness  are  in  the  towers,  the 
foundations  and  the  long  expanses  of  stone 
work,  which  stretching  inland  nearly  a  thousand 
feet,  serve  to  guard  and  strengthen  the  anchor- 
age for  the  cables  which  are  the  working  force. 
The  rest  is  wire,  for  the  most  part;  wire,  slender 
by  contrast  and  against  the  background  of  the 
sky,  but  endowed  with  great  strength  by  care 
and  skill  in  fabrication.  John  A.  Roebling  and 
his  son  had  staked  their  name  and  their  future  on 
the  strength  and  quality  of  Roebling  wire. 

[391     UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
DEPARTMENT  OF  CIVIL.  ENOINEE! 
nr-RKELEY.  CALIFORNIA 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

In  that  long  ago  story  of  the  Brooklyn 
Bridge,  there  is  written  the  lesson  that  clear 
thinking  and  courage  and  perseverance  can 
accomplish  the  seemingly  impossible.  What 
traveler  over  those  high-hung  roadways  ever 
stops  to  ask  himself  how  those  great  round 
cables,  stretched  in  long,  inverted  arches  above 
the  surge  of  the  river  traffic,  were  ever  put  in 
place?  They  are  today  simply  a  part  of  the 
stage  setting  of  a  busy  life,  like  the  river  itself. 

HOW  THE  GREAT  CABLES 
WERE  MADE 

Each  of  these  cables  consists  of  nineteen 
strands  of  about  two  hundred  and  seventy-eight 
No.  8  B.  W.  G.  wires  each,  and  each  wire  is 
continuous  in  its  strand,  like  the  yarns  in  a  skein, 
traveling  eternally  to  Brooklyn  and  back,  up 
over  the  top  of  one  tower,  down  in  a  long  curve 
above  the  tideway,  up  to  the  other  tower  and 
down  again,  to  be  gripped  and  carried  by  links, 
like  a  chain,  down  to  the  everlasting  clutch 
of  the  rock  and  concrete-bound  anchorage. 
Each  skein  is  a  million  feet  long — nearly  two 
hundred  miles — and  still  men  talk  of  "Oriental 
patience." 

There  is  no  twist  in  these  ponderous  cables, 
as  there  is  in  a  wire  rope.  Every  reach  of  wire 

[40] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

lies  flat  and  separate,  and  when  all  were  in 
place  they  were  laboriously  bound  together, 
first  the  strands,  then  when  all  the  strands  were 
up,  the  whole  fabric,  into  cylindrical  form. 
There  are  other  strange  things  about  these 
cables;  one  is  that  they  make  practically  no 
strain  on  the  towers  save  to  sustain  their 
weight.  Another  is  that  the  long  storm  cables 
that  radiate  downward  from  the  top  of  the 
towers  to  the  bridge  floor,  for  a  space  of  four 
hundred  feet  inside  and  outside  each  tower,  are 
themselves  calculated  to  sustain,  if  need  be, 
the  imposed  weight  for  that  distance.  So  that 
the  margin  of  safety  in  this  seeming  web-like 
structure  is  far  in  excess  of  what  timid  imagina- 
tions have  pictured.  That  was  a  cardinal 
feature  in  all  John  A.  Roebling's  plans.  He  left 
a  safety  margin  many  times  greater  than  the 
load.  It  has  been  an  open  secret  for  years  that 
the  Brooklyn  Bridge  has  been  unwisely  taxed, 
but  he  knew  it  would  be. 

STRINGING  THE  CABLES 
ACROSS  THE  EAST  RIVER 

Before  the  cables  were  in  place,  New  York 
and  Brooklyn  stared  up  at  the  river-wide 
space  between  the  bare  towers  and  wondered 
by  what  wizardry  a  bridge  could  ever  be  swung 

[41] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

across  it.  The  beginning  was  simple — as 
simple  and  prosaic  in  a  way  as  the  hitching  of 
a  horse — in  principle.  It  began  with  wire  rope. 
A  scow  with  a  coil  of  three-quarter  inch  rope  was 
moored  alongside  the  Brooklyn  tower,  and  the 
end  of  the  coil  was  hoisted  up  the  face  of  the 
masonwork,  passed  down  on  the  land  side  and 
then  carried  back. 

Next,  suspending  the  river  traffic  for  the 
necessary  time,  the  scow  was  towed  across  the 
river,  paying  out  as  she  went,  and  the  rope 
carried  over  the  New  York  tower,  then  wound 
on  a  huge  drum  till  it  hung  high  above  the  river 
and  clear  of  the  tallest  topgallant.  A  second 
rope  was  run  in  the  same  manner  and  the  two 
were  joined  around  huge  driving  wheels  or 
pulleys  at  each  end.  An  endless  belt  or 
"traveler,"  revolving  by  steam  power,  now 
stretched  from  city  to  city,  and  on  a  day  in 
August,  that  lives  yet  in  the  memory  of  every 
man  who  was  there,  E.  F.  Farrington,  the 
master  mechanic  of  the  project,  who  was  a 
veteran  of  Niagara  and  the  Ohio  Bridge,  set 
out  to  show  the  workmen,  who  on  this  slender 
aerial  were  to  begin  the  long  labor  of  hanging 
the  cable,  that  it  was  easy  if  you  only  thought 
so.  In  a  "bosun's  chair"  he  shot  out  from  the 

[42] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 


HELPING  TO  RELIEVE  THE  FREIGHT  CAR 
SHORTAGE  BY  QUICK  LOADING 


143] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

top  of  the  Brooklyn  tower,  down  the  long  sag 
in  the  traveler  and  up  to  the  New  York  side, 
while  a  million  people  craned  their  necks  from 
the  streets  and  docks  and  housetops  and  boats 
along  the  river,  and  swallowed  hard  at  their 
hearts. 

The  bands  played,  the  cannon  tore  the  air, 
the  multitudes  yelled  themselves  hoarse,  the 
steam  whistles  of  the  harbor  shrieked  to  the 
sky  the  tidings  that,  though  nobody  then  under- 
stood it,  "Greater  New  York"  was  on  the  way. 


This  was  six  years  and  a  half  from  the  time 
when  Washington  A.  Roebling  had  begun  the  work 
of  construction.  Seven  other  years  followed, 
years  full  of  troubled  effort,  of  planning  and 
replanning  and  replanning,  of  battling  with  the 
twin  devils  of  Contraction  and  Expansion. 
The  tensions  all  had  to  be  secured  in  absolutely 
uniform  weather.  A  determination  made  when 
the  sun  was  shining  on  one  part  of  the  bridge 
and  not  on  another  might  have  thrown  the 
whole  calculation  awry.  Sun  and  wind  played 
pranks  with  the  work  in  the  summer  and  in  the 
winter  snow  and  ice  coated  the  wires  and  run- 
ning gear  so  that  work  was  often  impossible. 

[44} 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

Deflection  varied  a  third  of  an  inch  for  every 
degree  of  temperature. 

"In  short,"  says  the  writer  of  that  time,  "the 
ponderous  thing,  while  neither  small  nor  agile, 
has  a  trick  in  common  with  the  minute  and 
lively  insect  which  when  you  put  your  finger 
on  him  isn't  there." 

THE  FABRIC  GROWS 
TOWARD  COMPLETION 

But  in  due  time  the  great  cables  were  in  place, 
and  bound.  Then  the  suspender  bands  were 
set,  from  which  suspender  cables  hung  to  hold 
the  frame  of  the  roadway.  And  so  the  fabric 
grew  toward  completion,  hung  practically  in 
two  sections,  which  all  the  world  nowadays 
doesn't  know,  with  an  expansion  joint  connect- 
ing them  in  the  middle  to  absorb  the  expansion 
and  contraction  of  the  metal.  Even  the  rails 
at  this  section  are  split  in  half  lengthwise,  to 
permit  them  to  slide  back  and  forth  with  the 
changes  in  temperature. 

There  were  accidents  and  drawbacks  and 
political  complications,  as  there  are  always  bound 
to  be  in  public  works;  there  were  believer  and 
unbeliever,  booster  and  knocker,  as  now,  but 
the  work  went  on  to  its  completion  and  in  1883  S/ 
the  day  of  realization  came.  Wire  was  king. 

[45] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

Doubters  and  malcontents  murmured  for  a 
time,  but  little  by  little  subsided.  The  opening 
of  the  bridge  was  one  of  those  memorable  days 
of  which  New  York  has  had  so  many  in  her 
brief  history,  a  day  when  President  and  Governor 
and  many  lesser  dignitaries,  who  have  now 
passed  from  the  stage,  strutted  their  little  hour 
to  hail  the  passing  of  a  milestone,  and  there 
were  "fireworks  in  the  evening." 

THE  BEGINNING  OF 
A  NEW  ERA 

A  new  era  had  now  definitely  begun.  There 
was  a  recognized  agent  in  the  world  strong 
enough,  with  engineering  guidance,  to  shoulder 
its  most  staggering  burdens,  and  the  name  of 
Roebling  began  to  weave  itself  in  letters  of 
wire  through  the  whole  web  of  modern  industry. 
Thirty-seven  years  have  come  and  gone  since 
the  Brooklyn  Bridge  was  finished  and  thrown 
open  to  the  swarming  people.  Even  when  they 
saw  they  wouldn't  believe  it;  many  of  them 
mounted  to  its  span  with  their  hearts  in  their 
mouths.  There  had  been  a  world  of  carping 
and  prophecy  of  disaster.  A  public  that 
clutched  at  novelty  as  an  addict  does  for  stimu- 
lant could  not  assimilate  the  idea  that  there 
could  be  safety  in  wire  where  such  enormous 

[46] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

weight  was  laid  upon  it.  Its  frailty  of  appear- 
ance fooled  them.  For  years  after  the  Bridge 
had  taken  up  its  load  and  was  carrying  without 
protest  or  misbehavior  the  traffic  of  two  cities, 
there  came  periodical  alarms  regarding  the 
discovery  of  strange  faults  in  construction,  or 
disintegration  of  the  wires  caused  by  vibration. 
It  was  the  one  dependable  theme  for  the  alarmist 
and  sensational  writer. 

But  the  proof  was  in  the  using.  The  slender 
span  has  stood  the  test  of  time  and  tide  and 
wind  and  wear,  and  stood  them  all  so  well  that 
it  has  fixed  for  a  century  at  least  the  type  of  the 
super-bridge. 

TWO  MORE  BRIDGES 
TO  BROOKLYN 

Wire  bridges  have  become  a  familiar  thing 
in  the  lives  of  cities.  Two  more  have  come  to 
give  the  crowding  population  of  New  York 
freeway  over  the  East  River,  as  the  city's  life 
has  spread  northward.  For  the  Williamsburg 
the  Roebling  firm  furnished  the  wire  and  in- 
stalled the  cables.  In  the  Manhattan  Bridge 
it  had  no  part  save  the  making  of  the  wire,  not 
a  trivial  task,  since  in  the  cables  alone  there  are 
12,000,000  pounds. 

[47] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

These  bridges  are  bigger  than  the  Brooklyn 
Bridge  with  which  the  troublesome  river  was 
first  overcome,  but  it  will  be  many  a  day  before 
the  glamour  that  surrounded  the  earlier  creation 
will  have  worn  away,  or  people  the  world  over 
cease  to  speak  of  it  with  wonder  and  a  certain 
measure  of  awe.  Anybody,  perhaps,  can  build 
a  wire  bridge  now;  perhaps,  too,  somebody 
some  day  can  build  one  with  more  of  simple 
grace  and  slender  beauty,  but  it  is  certain 
nobody  ever  has. 


[48] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CHAPTER  IV 
WHERE  WIRE  IS  MADE 

To  measure  the  growth  of  wire,  with  its  many 
forms  and  composites,  during  the  last  forty 
years  would  be  to  trace  in  detail  not  alone  the 
progress  of  science,  invention  and  mechanical 
industry,  but  the  myriad  conceits  that  have 
come  ostensibly  to  facilitate  the  process  of 
living.  In  the  search  for  new  comforts,  for 
means  of  avoiding  physical  exertion,  the  world 
has  been  littered  with  novelties,  and  most  of 
them  depend  on  wire.  Personal  life  as  well  as 
commerce  and  industry  is  interlaced  with  wire. 
With  the  opening  of  new  countries,  the  increase 
of  populations,  the  flocking  of  outland  people 
to  the  cities  and  the  consequent  lack  of  farm 
labor,  ingenuity  has  been  more  heavily  taxed 
to  find  the  quick  and  easy  way  of  doing  the 
world's  work  and  keeping  food  in  its  mouths. 
Wire,  so  adaptable  to  the  heaviest  as  well  as 
the  lightest  tasks,  has  labored  from  year  to  year 
under  an  increasing  demand. 

It  is  not  surprising  therefore  that  a  company 
which  in  such  an  impressive  way  had  fixed 

[49] 


OUTS    PINNING         THE         SPIDER 

itself  in  recognition  as  the  first  exponent  of 
wire's  usefulness  should  have  grown  in  this 
period  from  modest  commercial  stature  to  a 
high  place  in  its  field  and  to  the  enjoyment  of 
large  production. 

THE  GROWTH  OF  THE 
ROEBLING  BUSINESS 

When  the  sons  of  John  A.  Roebling  took  up 
control  of  the  business  he  had  established, 
about  one  hundred  men  were  employed  and 
the  product  of  their  industry  approximated 
$250,000  annually.  Just  before  the  beginning 
of  the  war  more  than  eight  thousand  employes 
were  engaged  in  the  manufacture  of  Roebling 
products  and  the  value  of  the  output  ran  far 
into  the  millions.  The  factory  which  was  so 
meagre  and  so  humble  in  1848  has  spread  its 
buildings  not  only  over  the  surrounding  acres, 
but  across  what  were  then  neighboring  farm 
lands  until,  constrained  not  alone  by  the  pyra- 
miding demand  for  its  products  but  by  the 
soaring  values  of  the  city  that  had  grown  up 
around  it,  and  of  which  it  had  been  in  some 
measure  the  creator,  it  went  pioneering  again, 
sixteen  years  ago,  down  the  Delaware,  and 
established  a  new  nucleus,  which  will  suffice 
for  a  long  period  to  come. 

[50] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

With  the  erection  of  the  cables  for  the 
Williamsburg  Bridge,  the  Roebling  firm  with- 
drew from  the  competitive  field  of  engineering 
contracts  and  concentrated  all  its  energies  in 
the  perfection  of  its  product — wire. 

In  view  of  the  more  distinctly  industrial  char- 
acter of  the  Roebling  enterprise  under  the  later 
dispensation,  it  is  of  interest  that  the  varied 
activities  of  John  A.  Roebling,  as  a  scientist,  a 
master  of  materials  and  a  peculiarly  astute 
mind  in  affairs,  have  been  carried  on  severally 
among  his  sons  and  grandsons.  Colonel  Wash- 
ington A.  Roebling,  the  president  of  the  com- 
pany, who  executed  the  plans  for  the  Brooklyn 
Bridge,  is  an  engineer  of  well-known  ability. 
His  intimate  contact  with  all  the  affairs  of  the 
company  during  such  a  long  period  of  develop- 
ment, his  kindly  and  generous  support  to  con- 
structive achievements,  has  been  a  source  of 
pride  and  invaluable  assistance  to  the  younger 
generation  of  the  Roebling  fraternity.  His  two 
brothers,  Charles  and  Ferdinand,  now  dead,  were 
both  intensely  active  during  their  lives.  Charles 
G.  Roebling's  talents  as  a  builder  of  plants  and 
machinery  and  an  unusual  gift  of  turning  out  a 
product  of  the  highest  excellence,  were,  in  a  large 
measure,  the  cornerstone  for  the  tremendous 

[511 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 

success  of  the  Roebling  Company.  It  was 
during  the  period  of  his  direction  that  the  manu- 
facturing capacity  grew  so  rapidly. 

The  simultaneous  expansion  of  the  commercial 
field  was  the  life  work  of  the  other  brother, 
Ferdinand  W.  Roebling,  who  carried  the 
Roebling  products  to  all  corners  of  the  globe. 
A  clear  and  far  vision,  an  uncanny  ability  to  go 
straight  to  the  point  and  a  keen  knowledge  of 
human  nature,  were  a  few  of  the  strong  traits  of 
his  mentality.  Under  his  control  of  financial 
and  ethical  matters  the  John  A.  Roebling's  Sons 
Company  established  a  worldwide  and  enviable 
reputation  for  stability  and  fair  dealing. 

Ferdinand,  although  an  indulgent  father, 
brought  up  his  two  sons,  Karl  and  Ferdinand,  Jr., 
in  the  old-fashioned  way.  They  were  taught 
from  early  boyhood  that  theirs  would  be  no 
bed  of  roses,  that  manhood  was  an  estate  where 
responsibility  must  be  accepted  and  assumed, 
and  with  this  teaching  ringing  in  their  ears  the 
mantle  of  the  presidency  of  the  company  fell 
upon  Karl  G.  Roebling,  and  the  secretaryship  and 
treasurership  upon  the  shoulders  of  Ferdinand  W. 
Roebling,  Jr. 

Both  sons  upon  leaving  college  were  given  a 
rigid  training  in  all  branches  of  the  business  and 

[52] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 


TOWING  WITH  WIRE  ROPE  HAWSER 


[63] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

early  in  their  careers  exhibited  the  executive 
ability  and  keen  business  foresight  which  their 
father  had  in  so  large  a  measure  developed. 
Karl's  talents  lay  principally  in  the  gift  he  had 
of  drawing  from  his  associates  their  whole- 
hearted fidelity  and  devotion  to  the  cause  of  the 
Roebling  prestige.  His  death  at  the  early  age  of 
forty-eight  was  a  shock  to  the  industry,  and  a 
great  personal  loss  to  those  associated  with  him  in 
the  conduct  of  the  business. 

While  all  of  the  Roeblings  have  possessed,  in  a 
great  degree,  the  qualities  of  leadership,  yet 
they  have  always  recognized  the  necessity  of 
surrounding  themselves  with  a  strong  organiza- 
tion capable  of  carrying  on  this  great  industry 
after  they  had  ceased  their  earthly  activities. 

It  was  particularly  under  the  regime  of  Karl 
Roebling  that  the  strong  foundation  was  laid 
for  the  present  powerful  organization — each 
department  highly  specialized  and  in  charge  of 
experienced  well-trained  heads,  ably  aided  by  a 
corps  of  competent  assistants,  all  functioning 
smoothly  like  a  well-balanced  machine.  Karl 
left  this  as  his  heritage  to  the  business.  He 
never  did  things  by  halves.  His  working  day 
was  long  and  intense,  but  to  one  so  constituted 
it  could  not  be  otherwise.  During  the  world 

[54] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

war  and  its  aftermath  the  added  responsibilities 
he  so  cheerfully  assumed,  contributed  largely 
toward  bringing  to  an  end  a  life  full  of  early 
accomplishments. 

Ferdinand  W.  Roebling,  Jr.,  the  remaining 
son,  now  vice-president  and  treasurer,  is  an  able 
engineer.  His  early  training  with  the  company 
was  entirely  in  the  manufacturing  and  engineer- 
ing side  of  the  business.  In  more  recent  years, 
however,  he  has  devoted  his  attention  to  its  finan- 
cial affairs.  His  close  contact  with  his  father  and 
brother,  his  thorough  knowledge  of  the  com- 
pany's policies,  have  well  fitted  him  to  sustain  the 
Roebling  name  and  all  it  represents  in  the 
business  world. 

THE  TRENTON  PLANT 

The  main  or  first  plant  of  the  company 
centers  around  the  site  of  the  original  buildings. 
Its  structures,  yards  and  tracks  cover  more 
than  thirty-five  acres  of  ground  about  a  mile 
from  the  center  of  the  city.  The  Delaware 
and  Raritan  Canal  and  the  Trenton  Division 
of  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad  pass  along  its 
western  boundary  and  directly  before  the  door 
of  the  offices.  The  office  building  was  erected 
in  1857  by  John  A.  Roebling  as  a  residence 

[55] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  later,  as  manufacture  crowded  in  around, 
it  was  given  over  to  business  uses.  The  spur 
tracks  of  the  Pennsylvania  traverse  the  company 
enclosure. 

Nearest  to  the  office  building  are  some  of  the 
structures  that  Mr.  Roebling  built  in  the  first 
periods  of  business  expansion,  among  them  the 
old  rope  shop,  where  by  methods  of  his  own 
devising  he  strove  to  meet  the  growing  demands 
for  rope.  Some  of  the  machinery  he  built  is 
still  in  service  in  production  of  standard  lines, 
showing  how  swiftly  and  how  far,  from  crude 
beginnings,  his  active  mind  advanced  along  the 
road  to  better  production,  and  how  efficient 
management  can  prolong  the  life  of  a  mechan- 
ism that  is  honestly  built  in  the  beginning. 

THE  BUCKTHORN  AND 
KINKORA  PLANTS 

The  second  or  Buckthorn  plant  lies  half  a 
mile  farther  to  the  south,  also  facing  the  rail- 
road and  the  canal. 

The  third,  which  was  christened  Kinkora, 
after  a  neighboring  village  on  the  railroad,  but 
is  now  Roebling,  with  a  station  of  its  own,  is 
ten  miles  farther  down  the  Delaware.  All  told, 
there  are  probably  a  hundred  buildings  in  the 

[56] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

three  plants,  many  of  them  of  immense  size  and 
manufacturing  capacity. 

From  the  wide  diversity  of  its  products,  the 
men  in  the  Roebling  establishment  have  come 
to  refer  to  it  as  a  department  store.  The  prob- 
lem therefore  of  distributing  its  operations  and 
keeping  track  of  its  large  volume  of  moving 
stock  and  its  equipment  is  a  substantial  one. 
While  in  some  lines  there  is  activity  parti- 
tioned among  all  three  plants,  in  the  main  the 
various  divisions  of  labor  are  well  concentrated. 
For  the  most  part  the  Upper  Works,  though  a 
considerable  quantity  of  wire  is  made  there,  is 
devoted  to  what  is  termed  "finished  product." 
In  the  same  manner  the  Buckthorn  plant, 
while  turning  out  some  rope  in  small  sizes, 
specializes  in  all  forms  of  insulation  and  the 
manufacture  of  lead-cased  cables. 

THE  KINKORA  PLANT 
AT  ROEBLING 

The  Kinkora  or  Roebling  establishment, 
carrying  the  production  of  the  subsidiary  New 
Jersey  Wire  Cloth  Company,  making  wire  net- 
ting, window  screens  and  other  forms  of  wire 
cloth,  is  given  over  most  largely  to  the  making  of 
steel  wire  and  the  fundamental  work  of  wire  and 

[57] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 

steel  production.  With  the  company's  large 
acreage  at  this  location,  its  townsite  and  the 
facility  of  river  transportation  as  well  as  rail,  with 
unlimited  water,  of  which  this  plant  uses  more 
than  is  pumped  by  the  city  of  Trenton  itself, 
the  situation  offers  large  opportunity  for  ex- 
pansion and  profitable  centralization  of  opera- 
tion. At  the  present  time,  while  shipments  of 
wire  are  made  direct  from  Roebling  to  manu- 
facturers who  use  it  in  production  of  their 
own  commodities,  by  far  the  greater  part  of 
the  output  goes  to  the  other  plants  to  be  fin- 
ished into  rope  and  specialties. 

Inside  the  tall  palings  that  enclose  the  great 
mill  buildings  at  Roebling,  there  is  an  open 
space,  broad  and  long  as  a  drill  ground,  threaded 
by  spur  tracks  and  heaped  endlessly  with  stacks 
of  pig  iron  and  steel-making  materials.  It 
seems  as  though  some  giant  had  dumped  there 
the  salvage  of  a  hundred  battlefields.  It  lies 
there  sadly  rusting  under  the  weather,  waiting 
the  moment  when  the  mills  shall  stretch  forth 
hands  and  hurry  it  in,  rush  it  like  a  neophyte 
through  the  fierce  initiation  of  heat  and  chem- 
istry, and  having  changed  the  very  fibre  of  it 
by  strange  processes,  send  it  singing  forth, 
shining  in  great  coils,  twisted  into  cords  and 

[58] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 


MAKING  A  CROSSING  BY  CABLEWAY 

[59] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

cables  small  and  great,  bare  or  insulated, 
bronzed  or  coppered,  galvanized  or  enameled, 
huge  and  bulky  or  spun  to  hairlike  tenuousness, 
to  do  its  work  in  a  busy  world. 

MAKING 
WIRE  STEEL 

Of  course,  the  making  of  steel  is  no  new 
story,  but  this  is  wire  steel — the  high  carbon, 
the  tough,  the  sinewy,  the  resilient,  that  must 
carry  in  itself  as  it  moves  along  through  these 
interminable  buildings  the  analytically  meas- 
ured proportions  of  this  or  that,  which  fit  it  to 
bear  up  the  traffic  of  a  giant  bridge  or  convey 
a  whisper  of  telephonic  sound  or  register  split 
seconds  in  an  Elgin  timepiece.  It  is  "pig," 
and  ore  and  "scrap,"  but  just  what  kind  and 
just  how  much  of  "scrap"  and  ore  and  "pig," 
these  are  subtle  questions.  It  costs  a  lot  of 
time  and  money  sometimes  to  answer  them. 

When  the  thirty-five  hundred  and  odd  de- 
grees of  heat  in  the  long  rows  of  open  hearth 
furnaces  have  brought  this  stubborn  mixture 
to  bubbling  and  seething  like  a  busy  kettle  of 
soup — a  workman  adding  a  little  manganese 
or  other  ingredient  to  the  broth  now  and  then, 
grimy  men  with  long  handled  steel  dippers 
take  out  a  few  thimblefuls  from  time  to  time 

[60] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  hurry  the  sample  away  to  the  chemist, 
who,  like  a  chef,  tests  the  quality  and  pre- 
scribes the  seasoning.  By  and  by  it  is  run  off, 
from  an  opening  in  the  bottom  of  the  furnace 
into  a  huge  caldron  they  call  a  "ladle."  A  fifty- 
ton  crane  conveys  it  down  the  long,  shadowy 
building,  to  halt  above  a  group  of  tall  moulds. 
A  wizard  up  in  the  gloom  under  the  roof  moves 
it  from  mould  to  mould,  a  few  inches  at  a  time, 
while  the  liquid  steel  is  drawn  from  the  bottom 
into  one  after  another.  The  moulds  are  left  to 
cool. 

BLOOMS 

Its  history  is  now  begun.  It  is  an  ingot — 
many  ingots — and  when  removed  from  the 
mould  is  loaded  on  steel  cars  and  borne  away 
on  its  journey.  When  in  due  course  the  ingot 
comes  to  the  "blooming  mill"  it  is  fourteen 
inches  thick  each  way  and  five  feet  long.  Heated 
again,  it  is  marched  up  on  a  steel  rollway,  also 
controlled  by  a  "man  higher  up,"  and  into  the 
hungry  jaws  of  a  machine  that,  after  a  series  of 
swallowings,  disgorges  it  at  last,  shrunken  in 
sheer  humility  to  a  diameter  of  four  inches  and 
with  a  very  long  face — some  forty-eight  feet 
to  be  exact.  And  no  wonder.  In  the  process 
it  has  been  kneaded  into  a  dozen  different 

[61] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

phases  of  flatness  and  squareness,  and  put  in 
a  way  to  profit  by  the  everlasting  squeezing 
and  stretching  it  is  to  undergo.  Now  it  is  a 
bloom. 

BILLETS 

Again  it  is  passed  on,  and  from  some  sub- 
terranean blackness  you  see  it  rushed  out  and 
up  to  a  sort  of  guillotine  that  first  cuts  off  the 
flawy  ends,  where  the  impurities  accumulated 
in  its  ingot  state,  and  sends  them  to  the  "scrap" 
heap,  then  lops  the  bloom  as  a  man  saws  fire- 
wood, but  a  great  deal  faster,  into  billets  vary- 
ing from  one  to  four  hundred  pounds  in  weight. 
They  are  "billets"  now,  and  at  last  are  counted 
the  raw  material  of  wire,  even  after  such  an 
inferno  of  cooking. 

A  steel  loader  gathers  them  up,  carries  them 
away  in  bunches  and,  by  a  trick  of  wire  pulling, 
deposits  them  on  other  cars  in  rows  as  regular 
as  the  pickets  on  an  old  fashioned  fence. 

THROUGH  THE 
ROLLING  MILL 

Along  with  the  copper  billets  they  are  stacked 
in  thousands  and  thousands  of  tons  in  the  stock- 
yard outside  the  doors  of  the  rolling  mill,  each 
in  its  group  according  to  physical  and  chemical 

[62] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

character,  waiting  the  next  purgatory  of  change. 
One  pile  is  marked  for  one  mission,  one  for 
another,  ranging  through  all  the  uses  wire  can 
be  put  to.  These  piles  are  forever  vanishing, 
forever  being  replaced,  as  the  wide  world  calls 
for  wire.  They  disappear  into  the  darkness  of 
the  mill  and  they  are  never  billets  again. 

Marshaled  on  cars  and  jammed  by  hy- 
draulic force  into  big  reheating  furnaces  like 
a  Brobdignagian  bakery,  fired  with  fuel  gas, 
they  come  out  glowing  again  and  start  on  the 
next  stage  of  reduction.  The  passage  through 
the  rolling  mill  is  a  short  life  and  a  merry  one. 
If  they  were  kneaded  in  the  blooming  mill  it 
was  a  mild  experience.  Here  they  are  mauled 
and  manhandled  and  masticated  by  swift,  con- 
tinuous and  looping  mills  that  are  born  with  a 
huge  appetite  for  the  largest  billets,  and  make 
rods  of  great  length.  Down  they  go,  under  the 
gripping  of  relentless  fingers  that  squeeze  them 
first  square,  then  oval,  then  square  again,  and 
pass  them  on,  always  smaller,  toward  the 
journey's  end.  Sometimes  it's  half  an  inch, 
sometimes  more,  according  to  the  needs  of 
trade. 

[63] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

THE  MILE  A  MINUTE 
JOURNEY  INTO  WIRE 

Wire  goes  the  whole  distance,  whisking 
along  through  the  murky,  half  dark  mill,  up 
and  down  at  a  mile  a  minute,  like  flaming 
serpents  flirting  fiery  tails,  as  the  men, 
armed  with  tongs,  seize  and  whip  them  from 
one  pair  of  rolls  to  another.  In  they  go,  around 
the  grooved  repeater  and  out  again  to  be  grabbed 
with  a  motion  swift  as  the  dash  of  a  pickerel, 
and  thrust  once  more  into  the  next  set  of  rolls. 
Always  the  lightning  speed  and  always  the  long 
tail,  red  hot  and  smaller  than  before,  and  longer, 
playing  "snap  the  whip"  down  the  steel  grooves 
to  the  bottom  of  the  "pit,"  then  straight  away 
up  the  incline,  a  flash  of  fire  in  the  darkness, 
and  on  from  roll  to  roll.  The  men  who  handle 
these  rods  hold  their  ticklish  posts  only  twenty 
or  thirty  minutes  at  a  time.  A  straight  eight 
hour  day,  if  a  man  came  through  it  alive,  would 
send  him  to  an  asylum  with  a  conviction  that 
he  was  great  grandson  to  Medusa.  At  the 
finishing  pass  where  the  man  stands,  a  stream 
of  four  rods  is  going  by  him  continually  at  light- 
ning speed,  about  a  mile  a  minute;  hundreds 
of  tons  in  twenty-four  hours  looping  the  loops 
through  the  rolls  and  finishing  in  red  coils  of 

[64] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

quarter  inch,  lying  innocent  and  rosy  and  round 
on  the  metal  floor. 

To  the  novice  they  look  like  wire;  to  the 
cognoscenti  they  are  only  rods,  and  in  order 
to  be  wire  some  day  are  hustled  off  to  the  clean- 
ing house  and  in  bunches  plunged  into  a  bath 
of  acid.  This  takes  off  the  scale  the  rolling 
left  on  them.  But  acid  in  wire  steel  is  like 
heresy  in  the  church.  It  has  to  be  purged  away. 
This  is  done  by  immersion  and  then  by  a  coating 
of  lime  to  neutralize  by  chemical  action  whatever 
taint  may  remain.  The  steel  is  then  baked  from 
twenty-four  to  forty-eight  hours  to  remove  the 
hydrogen. 

Wire  making  has  just  begun.  From  this 
time  on  it  is  a  wonder-work  to  the  novice,  a 
mechanical  sleight  of  hand  performance  by 
which  hundreds  of  shadowy  men  and  other 
hundreds  of  whirling  wheels  spin  the  rod  down 
ever  smaller  and  smaller  till  what  was  once  a 
stodgy  four  foot  billet  is  perhaps  a  thousandth 
of  an  inch  thick,  fifteen  odd  thousand  miles 
long,  weighs  less  than  a  quarter  of  an  ounce 
to  the  mile,  and  has  to  be  looked  for  with  your 
best  reading  glasses.  It  is  just  three  times  as 
fine  as  the  hair  on  your  head. 

[65] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

THE  WORK  OF 

THE  WIRE  DOCTORS 

Never  think  that  the  tall  chimney  of  a  manu- 
facturing plant  tells  the  story  of  all  that  goes 
on  in  its  shadow.  It  isn't  all  coarse  work.  If 
you  could  see  the  things  that  are  done  to  a  block 
of  steel,  and  the  brains  that  are  mixed  with  it,  in 
the  Roebling  plant,  before  it  comes  out  and  goes 
on  its  way,  they  would  make  you  take  off  your 
hat  to  a  piece  of  wire  for  the  rest  of  your  natural 
life.  But  it  isn't  all,  what  happens  to  the  out- 
side. There  are  wire  doctors  who  follow  the 
changing  symptoms  of  the  metal  through  its 
many  processes,  with  diagnostic  eye  as  keen 
as  any  medico's  for  traces  of  typhoid  or  mumps. 
Through  all  the  process  there  are  reheatings 
and  coolings,  at  carefully  specified  temperatures, 
to  give  temper  and  then  to  take  it  away,  to 
keep  the  ductility  without  sacrificing  endur- 
ance. It  is  one  business  where  you  simply  have 
to  eat  the  cake  and  keep  it,  too. 

There  is  wet  drawn  wire  and  dry  drawn  wire, 
and  chemical  reasons  for  drawing  wire  wet,  and 
divers  ways  of  drying  wet  wire  to  attain  certain 
conditions;  there  is  lubrication  by  means  of  dry 
materials  as  well  as  oil,  and  soap  suds,  funny 
things  that  also  act  on  the  material  itself  in 

[66] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


TRAMWAY  RUNNING  ON  WIRE  ROPE  CABLE 
DUMPING  COAL  AT  MINE 

[67] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

mysterious  ways.  But  this  is  no  text  book. 
No  thinkable  effort  is  omitted  that  will  help 
to  make  the  wire  material  perfect  in  quality 
and  service  condition,  but  the  proof  of  the 
pudding  in  the  making  of  wire  is  in  the  Olsen 
machines — miraculous  things  that  will  smash  a 
big  wire  rope  or  snap  a  hair  of  wire  and  register 
to  a  decimal  the  breaking  strength  of  each. 
There  are  tests  for  tensile  strength,  for  torsion 
to  show  how  many  twists  a  piece  of  wire  will 
stand,  and  for  bending.  There  are  microscopic 
tests  for  molecular  condition  and  men  who  will 
almost  tell  you  from  a  microscopic  section 
the  maximum  service  of  which  the  rope  made 
from  a  given  wire  is  capable.  Any  bundle  of  wire 
that  doesn't  pass  the  test  for  the  job  on  hand 
is  discarded  and  used  for  something  else,  and 
a  record  of  it  all  is  kept  with  scrupulous  care. 
Any  foot  of  wire  that  passes  through  the  ship- 
ping room  on  the  way  to  market  has  a  clean 
bill  of  health,  ample  for  the  use  to  which  it  is 
destined,  and  the  amount  of  material  that  is 
scrapped  for  faults,  where  work  is  on  stringent 
specifications,  would  be  sudden  death  to  a 
business  that  hadn't  a  wide  range  of  uses  for 
product  of  whatever  quality.  Fortunately  for 
the  users  of  high-grade  wire  the  market  for  the 

[68] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

lower  grades  is  always  hungry  and  crying  for 
more. 

THE  WONDER 
OF  DUCTILITY 

There  are  complexities  without  end  in  the 
making  and  finishing  of  wire,  but  the  real 
wonder  of  it  lies  after  all  in  the  initial  principle 
which  the  German  inventor  in  Bavaria  gave 
to  the  world  six  hundred  years  ago — the  simple 
but  even  now  almost  incredible  fact  that  a  rod 
of  cold  steel  of  the  hardest  quality — plow  steel 
is  the  convincing  name  for  it — can  be  seized 
by  its  sharpened  end  with  a  clamp  they  call  a 
dog  and  drawn  through  a  smaller  hole,  in  a  still 
harder  piece  of  steel,  three  or  four  feet  until  it 
can  be  fastened  to  a  drum,  and  then  be  wound 
off  in  miles  almost  without  interruption.  It  is 
a  wonder  that  grows  as  you  watch  it  and  yet 
it  seems  so  simple.  To  see  that  steel,  of  tre- 
mendous strength  and  hardness,  drawn  through 
a  tiny  hole  as  if  it  were  molasses  candy — and 
yet  it  may  have  a  tensile  strength  of  two  or 
three  hundred  thousand  pounds  to  the  square 
inch. 

There  is  nothing  spectacular  about  the  wire 
mill  where  this  is  done.  On  long  benches  the 
die^holding  appliances  are  set  up  and  the  dies 

[69] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

set  into  them.  The  wire — or  at  first  the  rod — 
is  run  from  a  portable  bobbin  they  call  a  swift, 
that  stands  on  the  floor,  and  the  wire,  after  it 
has  been  given  the  hole,  passes  to  a  bobbin 
they  call  a  block.  Then  it  is  taken  on  to  a  still 
smaller  die  and  the  same  process  repeated,  with 
occasional  reheatings,  until  it  has  the  diameter 
of  a  thread. 

CUTTING 
THE  DIES 

But  by  and  by  the  time  comes  when  the  wire 
is  so  fine  it  cuts  the  steel  of  the  die  and  loses 
its  rotundity.  Then  a  harder  material  is  needed 
and  the  wire  drawer  goes  the  whole  figure  and 
uses  a  diamond.  Cutting  the  steel  dies  is  a 
cunning  craft  enough,  but  the  expert,  who,  with 
a  hair-like  drill  and  a  dab  of  diamond  dust  can 
penetrate  a  diamond  with  an  opening  that  will 
be  regular  and  measure  to  a  thousandth  of  an 
inch,  is  a  man  who  would  think  it  no  trick  at 
all  to  pass  a  well  fed  camel  through  the  needle's 

eye. 

*       *       * 

It  would  take  a  larger  book  than  this  to  tell 
all  the  things  that  are  done  in  the  making  of 
wire  for  various  uses.  In  the  main,  the  entire 
volume  produced  either  goes  to  market  as  wire 

[70] 


OUTSPINNING        THE        SPIDER 

of  one  sort  and  another,  to  be  applied  to  its 
various  objects  or  for  sale,  or  else  it  is  twisted 
into  rope,  of  which  the  Roebling  Company 
manufactures  four  hundred  kinds,  sizes  and 
many  qualities.  The  common  fence  wires  are 
not  among  the  Roebling  specialties,  but  wire 
nettings  are  manufactured  from  a  soft  variety 
of  basic  steel  which  lends  itself  to  the  weaving 
process  with  almost  the  ease  of  animal  and 
vegetable  fibres. 

THE  ENDLESS  MANUFACTURES 
FROM  "FLAT  WIRE" 

The  "flat  wire,"  which  has  now  attained 
immense  volume  of  production,  is,  for  the  most 
part,  rolled  down  from  the  round,  in  many 
qualities,  and  shipped  as  material  to  the  makers 
of  many  things.  There  are  wide,  thin,  beauti- 
ful ribbons  which  find  their  way  to  the  shoe- 
string factories  and  are  cut  and  clinched  to  the 
laces  as  tips.  The  list  of  novelties  and  parts 
that  are  made  from  various  forms  and  widths 
of  flat  wire  is  as  long  as  the  list  of  Smiths  in  a 
New  York  directory.  In  the  novelty  shop,  which 
does  a  million  things,  wires  are  cut  and  mechani- 
cally bent  in  hundreds  of  thousands  of  shapes, 
for  clothes  hangers,  pail  ear  staples,  daubers  for 
bottles,  meat  skewers,  hog  rings,  thread  guards 

[71] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

for  textile  machinery,  basket  fasteners,  shackles 
for  car  seals,  saddlery  parts,  Welsbach  mantles, 
clips  and  links  for  bedsprings,  wiring  for  toys 
of  all  descriptions — and  so  on  and  on  and  on. 
And  all  this  novelty  business  is  a  side  line,  like 
the  square  and  triangular  wires  that  are  used 
by  oil  well  drillers  to  keep  the  sand  from  getting 
into  the  oil. 

The  special  shapes  of  high  quality  wire  that 
are  made  to  order,  to  provide  hard-wearing  parts 
for  typewriters  and  many  other  machines,  are 
almost  without  number. 

SALVAGING 
"MILL  ENDS" 

With  the  increasing  cost  of  labor  and  materials 
effort  has  been  made  to  salvage  and  make  use 
of  "mill  ends"  of  wire,  running  sometimes  to 
large  quantity,  which  formerly  were  accounted 
waste.  These  are  now  passed  through  a 
straightening  machine,  which  lays  them  out  in 
uniform  bundles  of  some  ten  feet  in  length, 
which  again  may  be  cut  to  shorter  lengths  for 
special  purposes.  In  the  buildings  where  this 
is  done,  at  the  Upper  Plant,  are  piles  of  neat 
bundles  of  all  shapes  and  sizes  and  grades, 
which  once  went  to  the  scrap  for  reworking  but 
now  are  utilized  without  additional  cost. 

[72] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

COPPER  WIRE 
AND  COPPER  ROPE 

Copper  wire  is  manufactured  by  the  Roebling 
mills  in  very  large  quantities  and  in  many 
sizes  and  forms,  principally  for  electrical  use 
and  for  service  where  water  corrosion  shortens 
the  life  of  steel.  The  little  bond  wires  that 
link  the  rails  of  railways  to  perfect  the  carriage 
of  current  in  the  block  signal  system  are  mostly 
steel,  but  copper  is  used  at  stations  and  on 
sidings  where  the  leakage  from  standing  cars 
is  apt  to  contain  acids.  Copper  wire  of  all 
sizes  down  to  the  very  fine  is  spooled  and  sold 
for  use  in  arts  and  manufactures.  For  marine 
uses  a  deal  of  copper  rope  is  made,  and  copper 
strand  is  twisted  for  lightning  rods,  the  fix- 
tures and  supports  of  which,  in  turn,  are  manu- 
factured from  round  and  flat  steel  wire.  The 
piles  of  this  equipment,  waiting  shipment  in 
the  Roebling  storerooms,  give  proof  that  the 
satire  of  the  cartoonist  and  the  mockery  of  the 
funny  writer  cannot  destroy  an  ancient  faith. 

The  telephone  and  telegraph  companies  use 
uncountable  miles  of  copper  wire  in  line  service 
and  other  miles  in  fine  sizes  for  instrument 
coils  and  divers  other  functions.  Electricity 
as  an  agent  would  be  a  halting  cripple  without 

[73] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

wire.  The  dynamo  would  have  little  more 
utility  than  a  washtub.  Armatures,  frames  for 
which  are  formed  from  flat  steel  wire,  are  wound 
in  the  Roebling  plant  in  impressive  number. 

One  of  the  largest  fields  for  copper  is  trolley 
wires,  which  are  of  great  size  and  of  many 
eccentric  shapes. 

This  is  merely  a  glimpse  at  the  utilities  that 
go  to  make  up  the  field  for  Roebling  wire.  It 
is  doubtful  if  today  the  company  owns  a  com- 
plete list  of  the  wire  it  has  made  for  special  and 
even  eccentric  purposes,  or  knows  within  many 
thousands  the  things  that  are  manufactured 
from  its  wire  product  after  it  leaves  the  ship- 
ping room. 

COATING 

AND  FINISHING 

Use  determines  much  in  the  finishing  of  wire, 
and  of  wire  rope  as  well,  as  not  alone  concerning 
the  chemistry  of  the  inside,  but  the  covering 
of  the  outside.  Material  that  is  made  for 
service  out  of  doors,  under  water  or  under 
ground,  to  ensure  long  life  needs  an  exposed 
surface  more  resistant  to  moisture  than  the 
naked  steel.  Copper  is  proof,  but  the  pure 
wire  is  expensive  for  most  uses  and  where  severe 
strains  are  incurred  it  lacks  in  strength.  Modern 

[741 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

science  has  been  too  busy  to  recover  the  art  of 
hardening  copper  which  the  ancient  Egyptians 
lost. 

Zinc,  in  its  best  application,  makes  steel  wire 
weatherproof  for  many  years  and  the  appar- 
ently simple  process  of  galvanizing,  the  fixing 
of  a  coating  of  zinc  on  the  steel  has  multiplied 
many  fold  the  utility  of  steel  wire  in  places 
where  it  could  ill  be  spared.  But  there  is  gal- 
vanizing and  "galvanizing."  The  first  is  worth 
the  money  it  costs. 

There  are  other  coated  wires,  too.  The  aero- 
plane strands  and  cords  are  tinned.  There  is  a 
bronze  enamel,  and  a  copper  coating  which  looks 
as  if  it  were  applied  for  protection  but  is  really 
the  incidental  result  of  a  dip  in  sulphate  of 
copper,  for  other  purposes  in  the  course  of 
fabrication.  The  coating  of  wires  is  chiefly  done 
in  the  wire  works  of  the  Kinkora  Mills,  though  a 
galvanizing  house  is  maintained  also  at  the 
Upper  Works.  For  wire  that  is  to  be  made  into 
galvanized  ropes  and  cords,  the  galvanic  treat- 
ment is  given  before  it  goes  to  be  made  up. 

JOURNEYING  THROUGH 
THE  ROEBLING  PLANTS 

For  exercise,  a  journey  through  any  one  of 

[75] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 

the  Roebling  plants,  and  especially  the  great 
Upper  Works,  is  as  good  as  thirty-six  holes  of 
golf.  It  is  upstairs  and  downstairs,  over  an 
interminable  number  of  thousands  of  square 
feet,  through  the  mazes  of  a  picture  that  is 
always  changing  its  detail  and  its  rate  of  speed, 
but  which  is  all  centered  on  one  idea,  to  keep 
the  stream  of  wire  and  wire  rope,  of  all  sizes, 
kinds  and  colors,  moving  toward  the  shipping 
room.  It  all  seems  so  easy  in  its  progress,  so 
free  from  friction  or  any  trace  of  confusion, 
that  the  layman  does  not  stop  to  consider  how 
many  problems  have  bobbed  up  along  the  way 
of  production,  even  of  the  most  modest  wires 
and  rope.  Wire  is  a  trade  involving  intimate 
knowledge  of  many  lines  of  business  and  manu- 
facture, since  the  character  of  wire  required 
differs  in  nearly  all. 

To  the  novice,  wire  is  wire.  Here  he  learns 
that  what  is  wire  for  one  thing  is  valueless  for 
another  and  wire  that  looks  to  the  unpracticed 
eye  as  if  it  were  ready  for  market  always  has 
to  undergo  a  few  more  processes  before  it  is 
up  to  demands.  Wherever,  however  far,  you 
travel  in  this  succession  of  high-roofed,  airy 
buildings,  you  come  always  upon  some  new 
regiment  of  machines,  some  new  container  of 

[76] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


HOISTING  FULLY  COMPLETED  LOCOMOTIVE 
WITH  WIRE  ROPE  SLING 


(77] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

chemical  or  metal,  with  a  long  line  of  reels  un- 
winding wire  to  undergo  some  additional  treat- 
ment. And  always  moving  among  the  build- 
ings are  cars,  big  and  little,  packing  wire  or 
material  from  one  place  to  another,  to  feed  the 
wheels  and  furnaces.  The  tonnage  from  plant 
to  plant  and  from  house  to  house  in  the 
Roebling  works  would  make  a  first-class  annual 
business  for  many  a  modest  railroad,  even  if 
it  carried  nothing  else. 

INSULATION 

But  when  wire  is  finished  it  isn't  always 
finished.  Since  electricity  spread  itself  over  the 
earth  in  a  million  services,  insulation  in  various 
forms  has  come  to  be  almost  as  important  as 
the  wire  itself.  Insulation  in  its  more  advanced 
forms  is  a  complex  affair,  gauged  to  accord 
with  specific  conditions  and  multiplying  pro- 
cesses to  secure  the  maximum  of  protection, 
both  from  electric  current  to  life  and  property 
and  from  dampness  and  abrasion  to  the  wire 
itself.  In  the  making  of  wire  screens  the  wire 
men  have  taken  a  leaf  from  the  cloth-mill  book, 
but  in  weaving  a  casing  of  cotton  or  other 
fibre  around  the  wire  for  insulation  the  process 
is  strongly  reminiscent  of  some  of  the  New 
England  textile  mills.  Long  rows  of  machines, 

[78] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

black  and  silent  and  swift,  reaching  upward 
toward  the  ceiling,  revolving  rapidly  on  an 
upright  shaft;  long  arms  trailing  downward, 
with  wheels  and  bobbins  like  fingers  plying 
dizzily  but  swiftly  in  and  out  around  the  wire 
which  unwinds  from  its  spool  and  keeps  forever 
climbing.  It  is  all  like  a  Maypole,  and  the 
bobbins  go  in  and  out  like  children  carrying 
each  its  ribbon.  As  the  wire  climbs,  the  whirling 
fingers  braid  around  it  a  coating,  tight  fitting 
and  impervious.  Sometimes,  where  double  in- 
sulation is  required,  there  are  two  sets  of  arms, 
one  above  the  other,  the  upper  one  putting  on 
a  second  covering  outside  the  first,  of  cotton 
of  one  color  or  another,  or  hemp  or  whatever 
else  the  experimentalists  have  found  best  for 
the  purpose.  You  wonder  how  the  bellcord  in 
the  railroad  train  can  ever  stand  the  pulling 
and  jerking  and  wear  and  tear  it  gets.  It  is 
simple.  It  is  just  a  perfectly  made  and  highly 
tinned  wire  rope,  with  a  double  coat  of  braided 
cotton  over  it.  The  jacket  may  wear  off  in 
time,  but  the  Roebling  rope  inside  will  never 
fail  in  a  lifetime  to  get  the  message  to  the 
engineer. 

When  these  snug  coverings  are  finished  the 
wire  for  certain  uses  is  taken  to  another  part 

179] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

of  the  works  where  it  is  unwound  once  more  to 
pass  through  a  bath  of  asphalt  compound. 
After  this  process,  which  leaves  a  dull,  dirty- 
looking  surface,  the  spools  of  treated  wire  are 
put  aside  for  drying,  and  then  a  final  surfacing 
applied.  The  next  journey  is  to  the  packing 
room. 

TELEPHONE  CABLES 

Insulation  is  a  wide  range  business.  It  cases 
wire  in  asbestos  to  prevent  fire  from  stopping 
its  work;  but  perhaps  the  highest  phase  is 
reached  in  the  great  cables  of  copper  wires 
used  in  telephone  service.  For  these  the  in- 
dividual wires  are  covered  with  paper  of  various 
colors,  which  serves  not  only  for  protection  but 
enables  men  at  the  opposite  ends  of  a  long 
cable  to  pick  out  unerringly  the  wires  with 
which  connection  is  to  be  made.  Colors  are  few 
but  possible  combinations  are  many.  The 
machining  of  this  is  more  than  ever  like  the 
Maypole,  with  pink  and  blue  and  yellow  strips 
of  paper  flashing  in  the  shadows.  When  the  wires, 
paper  covered,  are  brought  together  in  the 
cable,  sometimes  three  or  four  hundred  of  them 
altogether,  the  whole  goes  through  the  taping 
machines,  which  apply  one  or  two  suits  of  what 
may  be  called  "underwear,"  for  after  it  has 

[80] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

been  covered  with  two  or  three  different 
materials  there  remains  a  suit  of  lead  to  be 
fitted,  and  this  is  a  big  work  done  deftly. 

Who  has  not  seen  men  in  the  streets  drag- 
ing  huge  pipes  of  lead  through  the  open  man- 
holes from  big  wooden  spools?  These  are  the 
cables  you  talk  over.  They  have  been  papered 
and  clothed — and  tarred  and  feathered,  maybe 
— and  then  encased  in  lead  by  a  process 
that  is  so  easy  as  to  be  laughable,  and 
yet  as  ingenious  as  any  one  thing  the  wire 
miller  does.  Unrolling  slowly  from  its  spool, 
the  heavy  cable  moves  up  to  a  machine  built 
strong  and  four-legged  from  the  floor.  In  the 
mid  height  of  this,  a  few  feet  above  the  floor, 
is  a  square  chamber  containing  molten  lead.  The 
cable  passes  in  at  the  rear  and  upward.  It 
requires  some  credulity  to  believe  that  it  is  the 
movement  of  the  molten  lead  that  carries  the 
cable  along,  but  in  any  case  when  it  emerges 
from  the  "box,"  through  an  aperture  that  trims 
the  soft  metal  down  to  uniformity,  it  has  a  solid 
lead  covering  as  even  as  lead  pipe,  and  at  the 
point  of  egress  cold  water  playing  from  just 
above  cools  it.  Then  it  passes  on  through  a 
long  tank  of  water  for  final  hardening  and  is 

[81] 


OUTSPINNING        THE         SPIDER 

wound  slowly,  clean  and  shining,  on  the  great 
spools  that  are  to  carry  it  to  market. 

Many  astonishing  things  are  done  in  wire 
works,  but  done  so  swiftly,  and  smoothly  and 
in  such  volume  that  they  look  easy.  The  man 
in  the  street,  hurrying  about  his  own  business, 
never  even  takes  time  to  wonder  to  himself 
how  they  are  accomplished.  •:• 


[82] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

CHAPTER  V 
WIRE  ROPE— THE  GIANT 

"Pig"  and  "ore"  and  melting  materials,  with 
a  condiment  of  carbon,  are  the  body  and  bones 
of  steel  wire.  Their  virtues,  combined  and  in- 
tensified by  tireless  processes,  and  tested  un- 
sparingly at  every  stage,  are  united  in  wire  rope; 
and  wire  rope,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  is  the 
mighty  backbone  of  the  wire  industry. 

Wire  rope  to  the  multitude  is  simply  wire 
rope.  But  one  rope  is  no  more  like  another 
than  Jones  is  like  Brown  or  Smith  like  Robinson. 
Wire  rope  is  a  combination  of  twisted  wires, 
just  as  men  are  bipeds.  That  is  where  the 
similarity  ends.  In  outward  appearance  as  well 
as  inward  character,  habit,  tendencies  and  be- 
havior in  emergencies,  wire  ropes  differ  as 
widely  as  do  people,  and  each  has  a  meaning  of 
its  own. 

Each  also  is  the  fruit  of  long  study  and 
repeated  test  of  the  work  it  is  to  do  not  alone 
on  machines  and  in  the  laboratory,  but  under 
actual  conditions  of  operation.  The  wire  rope 
engineer  will  tell  you  every  rope  has  tempera- 

[83] 


OUTS    PINNING         THE         SPIDER 

ment.  He  spends  his  life  knowing  other  people's 
business — rope  business — and  working  out  their 
rope  problems.  The  answers  to  these  problems 
are  the  four  hundred  different  sizes  and  kinds  of 
rope  that  the  Roebling  Company  manufactures 
on  its  regular  schedules.  The  rest  are  specials. 
Go  where  you  will  in  the  world  nowadays,  you 
will  find  wire  rope  doing  the  work.  ;-. 

WIRE  ROPE  PROBLEMS  AND 

THE  ENGINEERING  DEPARTMENT 

With  the  completion  of  the  Williamsburg 
Bridge,  the  Roebling  Company  withdrew  from 
competitive  fields  of  contract  engineering,  but  it 
maintains  a  large  engineering  department  and  is 
ceaselessly  busy  with  construction  and  instal- 
lation problems  from  all  over  the  world.  In 
its  files  there  is  exhaustive  record  of  every  con- 
tract of  magnitude,  for  construction,  haulage, 
mine  work,  ship  work — for  any  sort  of  work 
where  rope  is  used  and  where  the  problems  are 
difficult.  Roebling  engineers  are  always  on  the 
go,  studying  conditions  where  rope  is  to  be 
used,  to  prescribe  the  fabric  that  will  meet  the 
need. 

There  is,  to  begin  with,  a  questionnaire  of 
ninety-three  questions,  to  be  filled  out  by  the 
master  mechanic  or  engineer  on  any  special 

(84] 


OUTSPINNING    THE    SPIDER 


THE  AEROPLANE— A  WIRE  ROPE  CREATION 


[85] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

work  for  which  rope  is  to  be  recommended  and 
manufactured.  When  these  are  answered  the 
engineer  is  ready  to  begin  work,  which  starts 
with  the  selection  of  materials  and  does  not  end 
till  the  man  who  is  to  use  it  has  had  specific 
instruction  as  to  its  peculiarities  and  care  and 
protection. 

For  this  service  the  Roebling  Company  main- 
tains a  large  corps  of  specialized  engineers 
busily  engaged  solving  the  problems  of  wire 
rope  usage,  and  making  suggestions  to  effect 
economies  in  wire  rope  operation. 

In  fact,  it  doesn't  end  there.  It  is  a  saying 
in  the  Roebling  establishment  that  a  rope  is 
never  sold  until  it's  worn  out. 

THE  "LAY" 
OF  THE  ROPE 

The  cut  ends  of  a  diversified  lot  of  wire  ropes 
resemble,  more  than  anything  else,  the  eccentric 
forms  of  snow  flakes,  in  their  regularity  and 
the  grouping  of  their  parts  around  a  center. 
But  there  is  nothing  haphazard  about  the  for- 
mations. Even  the  core  is  figured  in  the  num- 
ber of  days  it  will  add  to  the  rope's  life  under 
varying  conditions.  The  wide  difference  in 
ropes  consists  not  only  in  the  materials  em- 
ployed, which  have  much  to  do  with  their  re- 

[86] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

sistance  to  divers  strains  and  the  manner  of 
their  use,  but  in  skillful  selection  of  sizes  in  the 
wire  and  arrangement  in  the  strands  of  which 
they  are  composed;  again  in  the  distribution 
in  the  strands,  the  twists  of  the  strands  them- 
selves and  the  "lay"  or  manner  in  which  these 
are  twisted  to  make  the  rope.  It  is  all  the  result 
of  careful  calculation. 

THE  CORE 

A  paramount  factor  too  is  the  core,  in  secur- 
ing the  maximum  of  wear.  Its  mission,  in  most 
ropes,  is  not  to  add  strength,  but  pliability, 
and  to  serve  as  a  cushion  to  absorb  the  impact 
which  the  strands  make  under  the  tension  of 
service.  The  fibre  cores,  for  this  reason,  are 
usually  treated  with  some  lubricant.  In  the 
majority  of  ropes  hemp  is  used  for  a  core  but 
in  those  intended  for  stationary  service  the 
core  may  be  of  steel.  This  will  add  from  seven 
to  ten  per  cent  to  strength  and  very  largely  to 
rigidity. 

When  we  speak  of  wire  rope  most  of  us  have 
a  mental  picture  of  a  round  fabric,  but  there 
are  flat  ropes  as  well,  for  use  in  mines  or  quar- 
ries where  the  haul  is  from  great  depths  and 
twisting  is  to  be  avoided.  These  are  made  in 
all  widths  and  thicknesses,  and  are  constructed 

[87] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

by  placing  several  strands  together,  side  by  side, 
and  sewing  them  together  with  soft  iron  wire. 
But  it  is  the  round  rope  that  supplies  the  great 
demand. 

THE  STRAND 

In  considering  rope,  one  may  start  with  the 
strand.  Strands,  as  may  be  seen  from  the 
pictures  of  transverse  sections  of  ropes,  vary 
infinitely  in  character,  but  always  with  a  pur- 
pose. They  are  made  up  in  ordinary  practice, 
of  four,  seven,  twelve,  nineteen  or  thirty-seven 
wires,  according  to  the  work  the  rope  is  meant 
to  do.  In  the  rope  mills  you  come  upon  long, 
low  "stranding  machines,"  reaching  down  a 
long  room  and  carrying  in  horizontal  arrange- 
ment, wide  apart  but  in  circular  formation, 
the  wires  that  are  to  form  the  strand.  At  a 
point  carefully  determined  with  reference  to 
the  strain  on  each  wire,  in  order  to  preserve 
uniformity,  all  these  wires  come  together  and 
pass  through  one  opening  in  a  twisting  machine 
which  whirls  them  into  a  unit.  The  finished 
strand  is  wound  on  bobbins. 

The  direction  of  the  twist,  whether  to  right 
or  left,  is  of  moment  in  determining  the  char- 
acter of  the  finished  product. 

[88] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

"STANDARD"  OR 
GENERAL  PURPOSE   ROPE 

"Standard  rope,"  so  called,  the  general  pur- 
pose rope,  is  composed  of  six  wire  strands  and 
a  hemp  core,  all  being  practically  of  the  same 
size;  but  to  secure  particular  results  the  number 
of  strands  may  be  four,  five,  eight,  twelve  or 
whatever  may  be  desired.  Already  it  will  be 
apparent  that  there  is  wide  latitude  in  rope 
making  for  the  exercise  of  skill  and  the  utili- 
zation of  experimental  record.  This  freedom 
in  selection  and  adjustment  extends  through 
almost  every  process.  For  example,  in  the 
twists:  when  wires  in  the  strands  and  strands 
in  the  rope  are  twisted  in  the  same  direction, 
which  ordinarily  they  are  not,  the  rope  has 
what  is  known  as  a  "Lang  lay,"  after  a  rope 
man  who  devised  the  system.  The  twist, 
whether  in  strand  or  rope,  has  distinct  effect  in 
service.  It  may  be  long  or  short.  If  it  is  long 
the  rope  will  be  stronger  and  more  rigid,  if 
short,  it  will  gain  in  flexibility.  When  it  comes 
to  the  short  twist  rope,  one  sees  the  particular 
value  of  the  twisting  tests  which  were  applied 
and  recorded  away  back  in  the  wire  stage. 

[89] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

TESTING 
THE  ROPE 

It  is  singular,  but  it  is  true,  that  the  aggregate 
strength  of  all  the  wires  that  go  to  make  up  a 
rope  cannot  be  retained  in  the  rope,  at  least 
in  the  laboratory  on  the  testing  machines. 
When  the  rope  is  tested  for  breaking  strength 
it  is  found  that  no  sample  will  show  more  than 
ninety  per  cent  of  the  total,  and  the  average 
is  about  eighty-two.  Part  of  this  failure  is  due 
to  the  angle  of  wires  in  the  strand,  with  a  re- 
sultant stress  on  wires  in  excess  of  applied 
load;  therefore,  the  greater  the  number  of  wires 
in  the  rope,  the  lower  the  efficiency.  The 
other  reason  is  that  the  contiguous  strands  in 
the  rope  nick  each  other  under  high  tension, 
and  so  are  weakened.  This,  however,  may  not 
be  important  in  ordinary  working  loads  under 
service  conditions.  These  casual  truths  show 
with  what  multiplicity  of  tendencies  the  rope 
maker  has  to  deal  in  devising  a  product  to 
give  service  and  safety  in  the  often  ticklish 
jobs  it  has  to  do,  with  great  weights  in  hand, 
and  human  lives  at  stake. 

From  molecular  condition,  as  revealed  by 
the  microscope,  down  to  the  last  petty  detail 
in  the  plan  of  construction,  there  is  never  an 

[90] 


OUTSPINNING    THE    SPIDER 


THE  STEAM  SHOVEL  SHOVELS  BY 
MEANS  OF  A  WIRE  ROPE 


[91] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

end  to  the  problems,  and  gravity  has  to  be 
figured  into  the  lifetime  of  a  rope  as  surely  as 
the  elusive  trace  of  sulphuric  and  muriatic 
acid  producing  hydrogen  occlusion.  Wire  rope 
is  a  business  of  exactitude  and  eternal  vigilance. 
You  have  to  deal  with  breaking  strengths  of 
from  40,000  to  340,000  pounds  to  the  square 
inch  of  transverse  section,  but  the  wire  that 
will  lift  weights  at  the  rate  of  more  than  a 
hundred  tons  has  entirely  different  charac- 
teristics than  the  lower  strength  material.  And 
the  why  of  that  must  be  traced  back  to  the 
treatment  of  the  steel  when  it  was  passing 
through  the  wire  stage.  Rope  makers  dealt 
with  molecules  once  and  thought  they  were 
taking  pains.  They  found  they  had  to  go  back 
to  atoms  to  handle  their  problems.  Today  the 
secret  seems  to  lurk  in  the  electron. 

FITTING  THE  ROPE 
TO  ITS  WORK 

Of  the  tricks  in  making  ropes,  there  is  no  end. 
They  are  fitted  for  their  work  like  a  soldier  or 
a  gymnast,  and  built  for  it.  A  tiller  rope  must 
be  flexible  to  the  last  degree,  but  it  must  be 
strong  enough  so  it  will  stand  up  under  the 
swift  tensions  of  a  storm  or  in  the  lightning 
manoeuvers  of  a  race.  Therefore,  like  a  few 

[92] 


QUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

ropes  built  for  other  purposes,  the  composite 
parts  are  not  mere  strands  of  wire,  but  little 
ropes  in  themselves,  complete  in  all  parts.  And 
again,  while  ropes  exposed  to  weather  and 
stationary,  like  ships'  standing  riggings,  are 
galvanized,  those  that  are  subjected  to  con- 
stant bending  are  not.  For  every  variation, 
there's  a  reason. 

To  the  average  man  or  woman,  the  elevators 
in  tall  buildings  suggest  danger.  The  rope  en- 
gineer counts  them  highly  safe  because  each 
elevator  is  equipped  with  a  multiplicity  of 
ropes  and  safety  devices.  What  taxes  his  con- 
science and  spurs  him  to  the  last  possible  effort, 
is  the  rope  that  goes  to  the  "deep  shaft"  service, 
where  the  lives  of  men  going  up  and  down  in 
five  thousand  feet  or  more  of  subterranean 
darkness,  hang  on  the  accuracy  of  his  calculation. 

Only  now,  the  Roebling  engineers  will  tell 
you,  is  wire  rope  being  perfected.  Much  of  it 
is  in  what  seem  to  be  small  details  of  construc- 
tion, which  nevertheless  go  down  into  the  basic 
principles  that  make  for  efficiency.  Rope  mak- 
ing has  been  treated  as  an  exact  science,  because 
it  dealt  with  materials  that  were  more  or  less 
standardized.  They  are  learning  now  that  rope 
has  a  large  unknown  quantity  that  defies  for- 

1931          i  SNIVERSITY  Or  CALIFOR* 


,  CALIFORNIA 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

mula  past  a  certain  point.  For  the  lack  of  a 
better  term,  they  call  it  "personality."  The 
labor  of  today,  and  many  years  to  come,  is  to 
identify  these  intangible  factors  and  bring  them 
where  they  can  be  computed  to  the  end  of 
securing  greater  endurance  and  safety. 

In  the  Roebling  shops  there  are  men  working 
who  got  their  jobs  almost  by  heredity.  Their 
fathers  and  grandfathers  worked  for  John  A. 
Roebling. 

"You  ask  them,"  said  the  Chief  Engineer, 
"why  they  do  a  thing  a  certain  way.  They 
tell  you  simply  that  'that's  the  way  to  do  it." 
In  the  old  days  John  A.  Roebling  figured  out  the 
way,  and  gave  it  to  his  workmen  in  the  shape  of 
orders — to-day  somewhat  different  methods  are 
utilized.  To  the  cumulative  experience  of  over 
eighty  years  of  wire-rope  making,  the  Roeblings 
have  always  availed  themselves  of  the  latest 
engineering  skill.  With  up-to-date  research, 
chemical  and  metallurgical  laboratories,  every 
progress  in  the  art  has  been  incorporated  in  their 
product. 

FOLLOWING  THE  ROPE 
AND  ITS  USES 

The  Roebling  people  say  that  wire  rope  is 
their  "baby."  They  give  it  the  utmost  of  skill 
and  care  and  caution  in  the  making,  and  then 

[94] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

to  see  that  these  are  not  wasted,  they  follow 
it  into  the  field,  where  it  is  to  serve,  with  per- 
sonal attention  to  its  installation  and  with  the 
most  detailed  instruction  for  its  protection  and 
use,  figuring  out  with  nicety  the  speeds  to  be 
maintained,  the  size  of  the  sheaves  or  drums 
around  which  it  should  travel  to  minimize  the 
strain,  prescribing  its  lubrication,  providing 
printed  warnings  against  all  forms  of  misuse  or 
neglect,  with  pictures  to  show  the  reason  why, 
and  other  instructions  and  pictures  to  aid  in 
detection  of  the  first  signs  of  trouble  or 
exhaustion,  and  the  reasons  therefor.  Study  of 
the  Roebling  method,  from  the  ore  yard  to  the 
field  of  operation,  makes  clear  the  reason  why 
Roebling  rope,  from  the  very  beginning  of  the 
manufacture,  has  been  accounted  standard  for 
quality. 

A  Roebling  catalogue  is  never  complete.  It 
cannot  list  and  illustrate,  without  competing 
in  size  with  the  unabridged,  more  than  a  small 
part  of  the  uses  for  which  rope — and  much  of 
it  special  rope — is  made,  or  the  infinite  number 
of  attachments  and  accessories  provided  for 
installation  and  use  on  the  job. 

[95] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

WIRE  ROPE 
AND  ITS  WORK 

There  is  the  transmission  of  power  by  means 
of  a  round,  endless  rope,  running  at  high  velocity 
over  a  series  of  sheaves  or  pulleys,  carrying  power 
to  a  distance  of  three  miles;  there  is  underground 
haulage,  for  which  five  distinct  types  of  rope 
are  used,  enabling  the  engineer  to  make  light 
of  grades,  even  with  staggering  loads;  logging, 
in  which,  in  the  primeval  forests  of  the  North- 
west, the  horse  or  ox  is  a  pigmy,  and  where  the 
giant  trunks,  seven,  eight  or  nine  feet  in  diameter, 
are  whisked  up  at  the  sides  of  mountains, 
hoisted  into  the  air  and  deposited  on  cars,  to 
be  run  down  to  the  rivers  on  steep  inclines, 
again  operated  by  rope  of  great  size  and  strength. 
There  is  quarrying,  where  rope  is  used  in  quan- 
tity for  guying,  and  for  hoisting  the  blocks  of 
stone  out  of  their  beds,  and  then  on  aerial  cable 
ways,  to  carry  them  on  high  over  long  distances 
to  be  loaded;  there  are  the  oil  fields,  in  which 
just  now,  in  the  mad  search  for  petroleum  to 
supply  the  world's  shortage,  interminable  miles 
of  wire  rope  are  being  used,  some  of  it  an  inch 
thick  or  over,  to  carry  the  drills,  or  for  casing 
and  sand  lines.  There  is  shipping — the  battle- 
ship and  the  merchantman  and  the  liner;  the 

[96] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

yacht,  the  riverman  and  the  tug — all  strung 
with  wire  rope  from  stem  to  stern,  and  some  of 
them  from  truck  to  keel  as  well — not  to  mention 
mooring  lines  which  have  their  own  plan  and 
formula;  there  is  towing,  to  which  wire  rope 
brought  new  possibilities  and  freedom  from  old 
troubles  and  old  perils — witness  the  towing  of 
the  dry  dock  "Dewey"  from  Chesapeake  Bay 
to  the  Philippines,  thirteen  thousand  miles,  on 
a  pair  of  1200  foot  Roebling  hawsers,  which 
stuck  to  their  jobs  without  interruption,  through 
all  sorts  of  weather,  and  lugged  their  burden 
into  the  harbor  of  Olongapo  without  a  sign  of 
weakness  or  exhaustion;  there  is  dredging,  for 
which  wire  rope  has  largely  supplanted  the  old 
and  cumbrous  chain  which  was  never  any 
stronger  than  its  weakest  link.  There  is  hardly 
an  important  harbor  in  the  world  today  where 
these  stout  ropes  are  not  busy  clearing  pathway 
and  anchorage  for  marine  commerce. 

MORE  USES  OF 
WIRE  ROPE 

The  list  does  not  end.  There  are  incline 
railways,  in  the  mountains  of  East  and  West 
alike,  as  well  as  in  foreign  countries,  which 
have  made  mountain  climbing  a  primitive  form 
of  sport,  and  enabled  one-legged  men  with  per- 

[97] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

feet  ease  to  get  the  view  from  towering  peaks 
which  otherwise  would  have  been  accessible 
only  to  the  hardy  mountain  climber;  there  are 
cable  railways  with  which  engineers  have  been 
able  to  run  cars  out  on  an  aerial  roadbed  of  wire, 
over  impassable  gorges  and  morasses,  to  make 
fills  for  railway  or  other  construction;  cableways, 
the  forms  and  uses  of  which,  in  transferring 
materials,  are  without  number;  tramways  and 
traction  systems,  which  have  now,  save  in  par- 
ticular instances,  given  way  to  trolley,  and  the 
copper  wire  for  this,  again,  comes  in  large 
and  continuous  tonnage  from  the  Roebling 
mills;  there  is  the  perfect  litter  of  hoisting 
slings,  all  over  creation,  for  wherever  men  are 
doing  work  or  business  of  any  kind,  there  is  a 
load  to  lift,  and  the  wire  rope,  with  its  special 
appliances  for  quick  hitch  and  release,  is  fast 
relegating  the  old  time  chain  to  the  category 
of  antiquities.  In  1862  ^the  first  of  elevator  ropes 
was  made.  Today  millions  are  in  use. 
*  *  * 

It  is  a  long  story,  and  one  variety  of  rope  is 
never  just  like  another,  save  for  the  general 
purpose  product  before  referred  to,  which  figures 
in  the  schedules  as  "Standard."  But  in  the 
making  of  all  the  many  hundred  kinds,  the  pro- 

[98] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

cess,  to  outward  appearance,  is  the  same,  and 
impressive  in  the  simplicity  to  which  it  has  been 
reduced.  From  the  tiny  specimen,  made  for 
some  finical  scientific  experiment,  to  the  three- 
inch  monster  that  contains  single  wires  nearly  a 
quarter  of  an  inch  in  diameter,  and  drags  half  a 
million  pounds  of  ore,  with  the  aid  of  powerful 
machinery,  at  the  Spanish  American  Iron  Com- 
pany's mines  in  Cuba,  the  general  principle  of 
manufacture  and  the  mechanism  used  in  the 
making  are  all  alike. 

ROPE-MAKING 
MACHINES 

In  the  several  rope  mills  of  the  Roebling 
works  are  a  large  number  of  machines,  some  of 
which,  built  by  John  A.  Roebling  in  the  early 
days  of  his  rope  making,  are  still  turning  out 
rope,  and  good  rope.  His  first  product  was  made 
by  hand  in  the  old  "rope  walk"  way.  Today 
the  ground  where  he  did  it  is  covered  with  build- 
ings full  of  speeding  machinery  that  has  little 
rest — devices  that  stand  in  long  rows,  eating 
up  the  strand  that  unwinds  from  the  whirling 
bobbins  to  feed  it,  and  turning  off  steadily  the 
completed  rope,  which  passes  to  spools,  large 
or  small,  in  proportion  to  its  weight  and  size. 

[99] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

Simply  described,  the  rope  machine  pictures 
itself  as  a  hollow  column  cylinder,  strongly 
framed  and  braced  steel  from  the  base  of  which 
arms  extend,  like  the  lower  branches  of  a  spruce 
tree.  At  the  ends  of  these  the  bobbins  are 
rigged,  carrying  the  strands  which  are  to  be 
twisted  into  rope.  These  are  led  from  the  bobbins 
in  toward  the  center,  and  pass  into  the  column, 
which  carries  also  the  core  and  which  in  its  turn- 
ing twists  the  strands  together.  The  complete 
rope  passes  out  over  a  pulley  on  to  the  spools. 
Machines  for  the  smaller  sizes  of  rope  are  strung 
out  in  a  long  file.  The  larger  ones  require  elbow 
room ;  each  of  those  for  the  making  of  the  largest 
rope  has  a  room  to  itself  and  is  installed  on  a 
foundation  of  steel  and  concrete. 

When  the  mechanism  is  at  work  it  suggests 
somehow  the  solar  rotations.  The  bobbins 
have  a  triple  motion.  On  the  ends  of  the  arms 
to  which  they  are  attached  they  travel  around 
the  column,  at  a  rate  of  speed  which  of  course 
is  determined  by  the  "lay"  required,  but  they 
are  unwinding  as  the  strand  pays  out  and  also 
turn  completely  end  for  end,  at  predetermined 
intervals.  In  the  more  modern  machines  there 
are  two  set  of  arms  or  "branches"  above  the  first, 
for  the  purpose  of  carrying  a  greater  number 

[100] 


OUTSPINNING         THE        SPIDER 


'    M   / 
j  '--       >'      i  /    •     -        •  , 

''I  '    I/-/        .'.;    '. 


HOISTING  A  HUGE  NAVAL  GUN 
WITH  WIRE  ROPE  SLING 


[101] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

of  strands.  In  this  type  the  arms  carrying 
the  bobbins  are  somewhat  shorter,  allowing  for 
'&.  great-  rate  of  speed.  There  is  something 
mysterious  in  the  sight  of  these  flying  reels  of 
steel,  or  copper  maybe,  for  many  ropes  of  sub- 
stantial size  are  made  of  copper  for  marine  use, 
whizzing  round  and  round  like  indefatigable 
moths  around  a  big  steel  candle,  or  a  dervish 
round  his  own  spinal  column  on  a  spot  of  ground 
the  size  of  a  dinner  plate,  and  the  rope,  hard, 
shining,  round,  packed  around  its  core  of  hemp 
or  steel,  noiselessly  gathering  all  this  strength 
and  energy  into  itself  for  use  in  the  days  of  need. 
When  you  see  it  on  the  spool  at  the  side,  shining 
with  its  coating  of  lubricant,  ready  for  work 
and  able  to  do  it,  it  is  a  little  hard  to  associate 
so  respectable  and  dignified  a  fabric  with  the 
rusty  heap  of  iron  that  lay  in  the  Kinkora 
yard. 

SPECIAL 
CONSTRUCTION 

There  are  records  in  the  Roebling  offices  that 
tell  interesting  tales  of  special  constructions, 
and  pictures  of  enormous  spools  of  rope,  thou- 
sands of  feet,  in  big  diameters,  running  from 
spool  to  spool  and  since  one  spool  is  an  ample 
carload,  from  one  flat  car  to  another,  when 

[102] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

loaded  for  shipment.  Such  were  the  huge 
street  railway  cables,  made  for  Australia,  for 
Kansas  City,  for  Chicago  and  New  York. 
There  is  an  amusing  story  of  the  New  York 
street  railway  engineer  who  insisted  that  the 
cable  be  made  in  one  section,  33,000  feet  in 
length,  but  who  changed  his  mind  about  the 
beauty  of  it  when  he  got  the  goods  and  saw  the 
elephantine  spools  of  packed  metal  caving  in 
the  manholes  in  the  city  streets  on  their  way 
to  the  point  of  installation.  A  gigantic  rope 
machine  was  built  in  the  Roebling  plant  to 
twist  this  mammoth. 

The  cars  that  carry  these  heavy  cables  were 
made  specially  for  the  purpose.  An  ordinary 
car  would  crumble  under  the  load,  but  the 
machine  and  the  cars  are  still  in  use,  and  busy. 

When  cables  for  street  railways  were  dis- 
carded in  favor  of  trolley,  wire  rope  men  thought 
the  day  of  doom  had  come,  but  the  field  for 
wire  rope  for  other  uses  has  widened  so  fast  and 
so  far,  in  a  rapidly  widening  world,  that  the 
cable  orders,  big  as  they  were,  have  never  been 
missed.  It  furnishes  a  significant  index  of  the 
growth  in  all  industrial  activity,  for  there  is  no 
new  phase  of  development  or  manufacture  or 
work  of  any  kind  in  which  wire  rope,  or  wire 

[103] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

in  some  form  or  other,  does  not  play  an  in- 
dispensable part. 

POWER  IN  THE 
ROEBLING  PLANTS 

In  the  three  Roebling  plants  there  are  four 
electric  power  stations,  aggregating  over  16,000 
horse-power,  and  more  than  150  boilers  with 
25,000  horse-power.  The  coal  consumption  on 
the  three  plants  is  approximately  1000  tons  a 
day,  and  the  fuel  oil  consumption  about 
20,000,000  gallons  per  year.  In  the  Kinkora 
plant  at  Roebling  there  are  thirteen  miles  of 
standard  gauge  railroad  track. 


[104] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CHAPTER  VI 
WORKING  FOR  UNCLE  SAM 

Of  the  load  that  war  laid  on  productive  in- 
dustry, it  is  beyond  question  that  wire,  the 
country  over,  carried  its  share.  In  the  retro- 
spect, every  man  and  every  organization  tries 
consciously  or  unconsciously  to  figure  out  what 
part  individual  effort  contributed  to  the  big 
result.  Fortunately,  perhaps,  the  question  of 
relative  accomplishment  and  of  everybody's 
share  in  the  outcome  is  one  of  the  things  that 
can  never  be  settled,  but  in  the  picture  war  has 
left  on  the  memory  of  those  who  lived  it,  wire 
and  wire  rope  can  never  be  very  far  away. 

As  wire  pervades  every  industry  of  peace  and 
every  department  of  living,  so  in  the  headlong 
rush  of  war,  whether  by  land  or  sea  or  in  the 
air,  it  was  the  handy  and  dependable  agent 
that  made  a  thousand  other  things  possible. 
Wire  did  its  work  not  only  up  in  the  smoke  and 
the  agony  of  the  western  front,  not  only  where 
the  fleets  battled  against  the  lurking  death, 
but  along  every  line  of  plain  toil  by  which  the 
unhalting  supply  of  materials,  both  for  battle 

[105] 


OTJTSPINNING      THE      SPIDER 

and  sustenance,  was  kept  flowing  to  the  point 
of  need. 

When  the  big  order  for  multiplication  of  out- 
put came,  wire  rope  manufacturers  were  not  told 
to  make  one  thing  and  a  lot  of  it,  as  so  many 
industries  were.  The  demands  of  war,  on  the 
contrary,  added  diversity  to  what  was  already 
one  of  the  most  diversified  of  products.  Every- 
thing was  special.  Every  day's  new  load  was  a 
brand  new  problem  in  manufacture  and  in  con- 
struction as  well — something  that  had  not  been 
produced  before,  or  at  very  best  a  new  adapta- 
tion which  required  special  manufacture  and  new 
organization;  this  in  a  skilled  industry,  at  a 
time  when  skilled  labor  of  any  kind  was  scarce. 

A  STORY  THAT  WILL 
NEVER  BE  TOLD 

The  story  of  this  period  will  never  be  told 
in  its  entirety.  The  Army  cannot  tell  it,  nor 
the  Navy.  They  never  knew  it.  All  they  did 
was  to  call  for  the  stuff  and  get  it.  The  wire 
makers  will  never  tell  it  because  they  are  too 
busy  supplying  the  demands  of  peace — the  re- 
building of  a  wrecked  world  and  the  develop- 
ment of  a  new  one.  Already  the  picture,  big 
and  thrilling  as  it  was,  is  growing  dim,  its  detail 
disappearing  in  the  hurry  of  industrial  produc- 

[106] 


OUTSPINNJNG         THE         SPIDER 

tion,  the  solving  of  new  problems,  the  supplying 
of  demand.  They  look  back  over  the  old  re- 
quisitions and  specifications  of  the  feverish  days 
of  1917  and  1918  and  are  surprised  to  see  that 
dust  has  gathered  on  them  already;  they  count 
the  figures  of  overwhelming  volume  which  are 
their  "war  history"  and  wonder  how  in  the 
world  they  ever  did  it. 

THE  DOUBLE  BURDEN 
UPON  WIRE'S  BACK 

What  doubled  the  burden  on  wire's  back  was 
that  every  existing  industry  for  which  it  had 
been  making  rope  was  "essential."  The  wire 
men  looked  around  to  find  what  they  could  cut 
out.  There  was  nothing.  To  maintain  the 
supply  of  oil,  of  coal,  of  ores,  of  food,  to  keep  all 
kinds  of  transportation  in  full  swing,  to  see  that 
elevators  kept  running  so  that  activity  should 
not  cease — these  and  a  thousand  other  things 
were  all  essential  to  unity  of  effort  and  increase 
of  production.  Altogether  the  saving  was 
trivial.  They  all  had  to  be  supplied,  most  of 
them  double,  and  the  Allies  had  been  piling  in 
orders.  On  top  of  this  burly  task  came  our  own 
Government's  great  and  variegated  and  un- 
deniable demands  for  war  supplies. 

[107] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

In  the  carrying  of  such  a  load  the  wire  in- 
dustry was  hampered  by  the  fewness  of  its 
plants  and  their  distribution  over  the  States, 
some  of  them  far  from  points  of  ocean  ship- 
ment. It  was  plain  when  America  entered  the 
war  that  only  the  most  thorough  co-ordination 
and  centralized  control  of  operation  could  make 
success  possible;  only  the  most  economical 
arrangement  of  forces  and  distribution  of 
materials. 

The  Iron  and  Steel  Institute,  at  the  request 
of  the  Government,  formed  a  committee  to 
manage  the  production  and  distribution  of  wire 
rope,  and  from  the  fifteenth  of  May,  1917,  this 
committee  had  on  its  shoulders  the  making  of 
wire  necessary  to  keep  the  country's  work  going 
at  full  speed  and  to  supply  the  needs  for  war, 
of  whose  extent  or  character  nobody  had  any 
clear  idea.  Karl  G.  Roebling,  of  John  A. 
Roebling's  Sons  Co.,  was  made  chairman  of  the 
committee. 

THE  WAR— ONE  LONG 
COMMITTEE  MEETING 

Throughout  the  war,  the  Roebling  offices  in 
Trenton  were  headquarters  for  the  entire  busi- 
ness of  wire  rope  supply.  It  was  one  long  com- 
mittee meeting,  with  production  going  on  at 

[108] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

utmost  intensity  all  the  time.  Here  came  all 
the  orders  for  wire  rope  from  the  several  Govern- 
ment departments  and  the  bureaus  in  those 
departments,  each  with  its  long  array  of  speci- 
fications, all  requiring  shipment  to  divers  points. 
Much  of  the  work  required  also  a  great  labor  of 
cutting  and  attaching,  and  fittings  by  the 
hundreds  of  thousands,  and  all,  without  an 
exception  that  stands  out  in  anybody's  memory, 
wanted  in  the  minimum  of  time. 

It  is  the  proud  record  of  that  committee  that 
when  the  fighting  ended  in  November  of  19  IS 
every  order  had  been  filled  and  delivery  made  on 
time.  Industry  has  no  story  of  accomplishment 
to  tell  that  can  be  more  creditable  than  this. 
The  Roebling  plants,  near  to  the  seaboard  and 
equipped  for  specialization,  were  devoted  almost 
wholly  to  the  manufacture  of  war  stuff,  domestic 
industrial  orders  being  transferred  to  inland 
factories. 

THE  RECORD  OF  PRODUCTION 
FOR  WAR  PURPOSES 

The  record  of  production,  for  war  purposes 
alone,  shows  that  the  Roebling  Company  manu- 
factured a  very  large  percentage  of  the  whole, 
which  ran  to  unconscionable  millions  of  feet. 
During  the  war  the  productive  capacity  of  the 

[109] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

plant  was  increased  as  much  as  seventy-five 
per  cent,  and  the  list  of  the  employed  at  times 
ran  close  to  ten  thousand  men.  The  numerical 
increase  in  men  did  not  equal  the  growth  in 
output.  Here  as  well  as  in  almost  every  line  of 
industry  the  war  furnished  a  revelation  of  the 
capacity  of  men  for  work.  New  lines  of  pro- 
duction, requiring  skill,  developed  in  common 
laborers,  the  only  kind  that  at  times  could  be 
obtained,  a  facility  in  production  that  before 
the  pressure  of  war  came  to  discover  it  would 
have  been  thought  impossible. 

In  looking  back  over  the  war  work  it  is  plain 
that  the  service  rendered  by  the  company  in 
manufacturing  material  for  the  Allies,  prior  to 
America's  entrance  into  hostilities,  was  of  large 
value  in  familiarizing  it  with  forms  of  produc- 
tion afterward  required  for  our  own  Army  and 
Navy.  Another  thing  which  aided  in  meeting 
a  vast  demand  was  the  unremitting  attention 
which  the  company  had  given  to  the  perfection 
of  aircraft  material,  from  the  first  successful 
flight  of  the  Wright  brothers  at  Kitty  Hawk  in 
1903.  At  that  time  study  and  experiment  had 
been  started  in  the  Roebling  factories  looking 
to  the  production  of  aircraft  wire  and  strand 
and  cord  for  all  the  different  parts  involved, 

[no] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

which  should  combine  the  utmost  strength  with 
the  minimum  of  weight,  with  special  reference 
to  the  stresses  peculiar  to  aviation  work. 

When  the  hour  of  need  came,  Roebling  air- 
craft products  had  reached  a  stage  of  perfection 
which  saved  a  world  of  hurried  experimenta- 
tion and  development.  It  was  a  demonstra- 
tion in  preparedness,  although  up  to  1914  the 
work  had  been  done  solely  to  keep  industrial 
pace  with  a  new  and  important  development  of 
mechanical  science. 

THE  GOVERNMENT  ESTABLISHMENTS 
THAT  CALLED  FOR  WIRE  AND  ROPE 

It  is  a  fairly  long  list  of  Government  establish- 
ments that  is  shown  on  the  Roebling  records 
as  calling  for  war  supply  of  wire  rope.  It  in- 
cludes, in  the  Navy  Department,  the  Bureau 
of  Steam  Engineering,  Bureau  of  Construction 
and  Repair,  Bureau  of  Ordnance,  the  Bureau 
of  Yards  and  Docks  and  the  Naval  Aircraft 
Factory. 

In  the  War  Department  were  the  following: 
Office  of  the  Chief  of  Ordnance,  Depot  Quarter- 
master, Chief  Signal  Officer,  Chief  of  Engineers, 
the  Army  Transport  Service,  the  Quarter- 
master General's  Office,  the  Signal  Corps,  the 
Aircraft  Production  Bureau,  United  States  En- 

[iii] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

gineer's  Office,  General  Engineer  Depot,  Bureau 
of  Insular  Affairs,  Procurement  Division,  the 
Balloon  Department  of  the  Aircraft  Production 
Board,  and  the  Director  General  of  Military 
Railways. 

Always  there  were  the  United  States  Shipping 
Board,  the  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation,  and 
the  demands  for  these  alone  were  a  business. 
In  addition  to  all  this  the  Committee  made 
allocation  of  orders  for  the  Argentine  Naval 
Commission,  the  British  War  Commission,  the 
Imperial  Munitions  Board,  the  Italian  Com- 
mission and  the  Belgian  Government. 

It  doesn't  seem  such  a  large  roster,  but  it 
took  a  world  of  wire  to  go  around  it.  A  few 
figures  out  of  the  total  allocations  will  suggest 
what  the  total  demand  was  and  the  task  that 
it  involved. 

SOME  OF  THE 
BIG  DEMANDS 

The  first  big  call  on  the  wire  rope  pro- 
ducers was  for  submarine  nets  to  protect  the 
fleet  bases  and  harbors.  There  were  supplied 
to  the  Navy,  for  this  purpose,  2,820,520  feet  of 
rope,  and  it  was  regular  rope  that  was  required 
in  this  service,  for  the  German  submarines  had 
developed  a  way  of  slashing  through  the  earlier 

[112] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CUP  CHALLENGERS,  DEFENDERS  AND  SAILING  VESSELS 
OF  ALL  TYPES  SECURE  THEIR  RIGGING  WITH  WIRE  ROPE 


[113] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  lighter  nets.  For  the  new  type  the  rope 
ranged  from  an  inch  and  a  half  to  three-quarters 
of  an  inch;  but  it  wasn't  merely  a  matter  of 
shipping  reels  of  rope.  Almost  all  of  it  had  to 
be  cut  into  lengths  and  attachments  made,  for 
these  barriers  were  designed  in  sections.  This 
necessitated,  for  the  Navy  order,  153,000  fittings. 
The  Army  Ordnance  Bureau  used  nearly  a 
million  feet  of  rope  for  nettings,  which  was 
shipped  to  various  coast  forts.  The  whole 
volume  of  wire  rope  for  nettings  was  furnished 
within  four  months. 

Another  interesting  order  was  from  the 
Quartermaster's  Department,  which  called  for 
6,852,500  feet  of  rope  and  the  manufacture  of 
300,000  pairs  of  traces,  requiring  3,000,000 
splices.  These  are  what  are  called  thimble 
splices,  and,  while  fitting  one  of  them  is  ordi- 
narily half  an  hour's  work,  the  Roebling  plant, 
with  a  force  chiefly  of  men  who  were  utterly 
unskilled,  was  turning  off  ten  thousand  pairs 
of  traces  a  day  at  the  peak  of  production  on 
this  order.  This  harness,  for  artillery  purposes, 
was  on  English  designs,  adopted  after  consider- 
able delay,  but  by  means  of  which  a  horse, 
when  shot  down,  could  be  eliminated  from  the 
gun  team  in  half  a  minute. 

[114] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

The  Spruce  Production  Bureau  took  over 
8,000,000  feet  of  rope,  the  Emergency  Fleet 
more  than  12,000,000  and  the  Fuel  Administra- 
tion drew  on  at  the  rate  of  2,500  tons  a  month. 
And  all  the  time  the  mines  and  mills  and 
ordnance  plants,  locomotives,  cranes  and  all 
other  manufactures  kept  getting  largely  increased 
supplies  of  rope  to  carry  on  their  own  war- 
driven  work.  Altogether  the  orders  come  to  a 
figure  that  is  hard  to  visualize. 

84,000,000  FEET  OF  ROPE  AND 
A  HALF  MILLION  FITTINGS 

But  the  climax,  the  call  that  taxed  the  wire 
rope  makers  most  heavily  and  kept  the  arc 
lights  burning  in  the  mills  was  for  the  84,000,000 
and  odd  feet  of  rope  and  half  million  fittings 
which  were  required  by  the  Naval  Establish- 
ment for  the  North  Sea  Mine  Barrage,  which 
put  a  prompt  and  distinguished  shackle  on  the 
German  submarines.  The  fitting  of  this  rope 
was  a  task  of  moment,  calling  as  it  did  for  de- 
livery of  the  rope  in  lengths  and  made  up  ready 
for  attachment  on  the  ingenious  plan  which  the 
mine  involved.  It  was  all  done  with  time  to 
spare. 

The  Adriatic  Barrage,  an  even  more  ambitious 
project  since  it  dealt  with  a  depth  of  3,000  in- 

[115] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

stead  of  900  feet,  was  all  ready  to  be  laid  when 
the  Armistice  was  signed.  This  took  over 
12,000,000  feet  of  rope. 

When  the  fighting  stopped,  there  was  a  per- 
fectly good  mine  barrage  in  the  North  Sea 
that  had  to  be  taken  up  and  put  out  of  com- 
mission. This  called  for  616,000  feet  more 
of  rope,  with  fittings  to  make  it  of  use.  Every 
mine  was  cancelled  without  a  mishap,  and 
there  are  now  more  than  eighty  million  feet 
of  "A  No.  1"  wire  rope  reposing  at  the  bottom 
of  the  North  Sea.  But  it  did  its  work,  captur- 
ing no  less  than  seventeen  German  submarines 
in  the  first  week. 

AND  MORE  THAN  WIRE 
ROPE  WAS  ASKED  FOR 

The  Roebling  plant,  for  the  time,  was  given 
over  to  the  manufacture  of  war  necessities, 
hence  its  problems  of  material  were  made  easy 
by  the  Director  of  Steel  Supply.  But  the 
Roebling  output  for  war  purposes  did  not  end 
with  wire  rope.  In  May,  1918,  the  company 
was  employing  close  to  ten  thousand  men,  and 
in  addition  to  rope  making  they  were  busy 
with  the  manufacture  of  immense  quantities  of 
steel  strand,  strand  for  outpost  cables,  copper 
strand,  telephone  wire,  copper  wire  and  mis- 
Hie] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

cellaneous  wires  of  all  descriptions,  which  were 
needed  in  the  service  at  home  and  abroad. 

A  material  part  of  the  war  work  was  the 
manufacture  of  wire  especially  for  the  field 
telegraph  and  telephone  systems  of  the  Signal 
Corps  in  Europe,  where  the  American  Army 
communications  were  the  admiration  of 
Europeans.  This  material  possessed  certain 
peculiar  characteristics,  and  while  speed  in  its 
production  was  an  essential  yet  it  was  necessary 
that  every  strand  be  perfect,  for  the  fate  of 
armies  rested  upon  it. 

The  manufacture  of  this  wire  involved  a 
great  deal  of  detail  and  intimate  knowledge  of 
all  sorts  of  materials,  for  while  copper  is  used 
for  electrical  transmission  there  is  an  exterior 
protection  of  other  metals  and  materials,  each 
of  which  has  its  peculiar  manufacturing  diffi- 
culties. 

THE  COMPOSITE 

STEEL  AND  COPPER  STRAND 

For  example,  the  "Composite  Steel  and 
Copper  Strand"  wire  used  by  the  Army  was 
made  up  as  follows:  There  was  a  center  wire 
of  tinned  copper  with  ten  outside  wires  of 
tinned  steel.  This  wire  had  a  maximum  weight 
of  75  pounds  a  mile  with  a  maximum  breaking 

[117] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

weight  of  300  pounds.  Other  types  of  wire 
were  silk  wrapped,  covered  with  a  rubber  com- 
pound or  with  a  covering  of  cotton  braid  treated 
with  a  waterproofing  compound. 

TO  MEET  THE  SIGNAL 
CORPS'  REQUIREMENTS 

Take  one  type  of  the  thousands  manufactured 
by  the  Roebling  Company  and  see  what  must 
be  done  to  make  the  finished  product  for  the 
Signal  Corps.  This  process,  which  includes 
both  the  manufacture  of  steel  wire  for  the  outer 
protection  and  copper  wire  for  transmission, 
may  be  divided  into  the  following  parts: 

All  steel  materials  are  analyzed  and  inspected. 
Acid  open  hearth  steel  is  made  in  ingot  form  in 
special  furnaces.  The  steel  is  classified,  and 
the  ingots  are  reheated  and  rolled  into  billets, 
which  are  cropped  to  eliminate  all  segregation. 
The  steel  billets  are  reheated  and  rolled  into 
rods  of  about  ^  inch  diameter.  The  rods  are 
then  tempered  for  wire  drawing.  Then  comes 
an  inspection  and  testing  for  physical  charac- 
teristics of  the  metal,  and  the  rods  are  cleaned 
in  acid,  washed,  lime  coated  and  left  to  dry. 

These  rods  are  then  drawn  cold  through  dies 
to  intermediate  sizes  requiring  a  repetition  of 
the  tempering,  inspecting  and  cleaning  opera- 
ins  ] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

tions.  There  is  another  series  of  drawing  and 
then  the  final  one  through  the  hardest  and 
toughest  dies  obtainable  to  a  diameter  of  ^ 
inch.  At  this  diameter  one  foot  of  the  original 
rod  has  been  extended  to  about  350  feet. 

Then  comes  another  inspection  and  test  of 
the  mechanical  properties.  The  wire  is  next 
cleaned  in  alkaline  and  acid  solutions  to  remove 
all  trace  of  the  lubricants  used  in  the  wire 
drawing,  and  the  wire  is  subjected  to  a  bath  in 
pure  hot  tin.  Finally  there  is  a  Government 
inspection  and  test. 

So  much  for  the  manufacture  of  steel  wire. 
The  copper  first  appears  in  bars,  which  are  in- 
spected and  tested  for  their  metallic  purity. 
The  bars  are  heated  and  rolled  into  rods  of 
about  y%  inch  diameter.  These  rods  are  cleaned 
in  acid  baths  to  remove  all  scale,  and  the  wire 
drawn  with  the  necessary  annealing  and  clean- 
ing until  wire  that  is  only  .0285  of  an  inch  in 
diameter  is  the  result. 

The  final  drawing  of  this  wire  requires  the 
use  of  diamond  dies  with  the  necessary  equip- 
ment and  great  skill  of  the  wire  drawers  in 
piercing  these  minute  openings.  The  copper 
wire  then  is  annealed  free  from  all  scale  and 
discoloration,  and  the  tin  coat  applied  by  means 

[119] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

of  a  liquid  tin   bath.     Then  the  Government 
inspectors  test  the  copper  wire. 

Ten  strands  of  the  steel  wire  are  twisted 
about  the  one  copper  wire,  and  the  Government 
inspectors  again  make  tests  to  see  if  the  inner 
copper  wire  is  intact  and  properly  protected  by 
steel  wire.  All  grease  is  removed  from  the 
strand,  and  tussah  silk  wrapped  over  the  whole. 
To  this  is  applied  a  compound  with  30  per  cent 
rubber,  which  is  later  vulcanized.  Then  come 
inspections  for  mechanical  injuries  and  electrical 
characteristics.  The  single  conductors  are 
braided,  the  braid  waterproofed,  polished, 
twined,  inspected,  reeled  for  shipment,  in- 
spected by  the  Government  agents,  packed, 
inspected  again  by  the  Government  agents  and 
finally  shipped. 

All  this  is  done  with  a  great  deal  of  rapidity 
but  with  no  less  care,  the  skill  obtained  by  the 
workmen  only  by  years  of  experience  and  by 
the  technical  men  only  by  years  of  study.  It 
required  a  thorough  knowledge  of  steel  and  of 
the  materials  entering  into  the  manufacture 
of  steel,  such  as  ore,  pig  iron  and  fuel,  as  well 
as  of  the  properties  and  tests  and  manufacture 
of  copper,  tin,  rubber,  cotton,  and  various 
lubricants.  And  in  the  more  general  use  of 

[120] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

wire  and  wire  rope,  a  thoroughly  comprehensive 
knowledge  of  many  other  materials,  all 
mechanical  and  electrical  phenomena  in  fact, 
are  essential. 


1121] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 


CHAPTER  VII 
A  CITY  BUILT  OUT  OF  HAND 

All  up  and  down  the  Delaware,  between 
Trenton  and  Philadelphia,  the  "quality  folks" 
in  olden  times  used  to  build  stately  homes,  with 
broad  acres  at  their  backs  and  looking  lordly, 
with  their  Grecian  porticos,  out  from  the  high 
banks  that  command  the  stream.  You  may 
see  some  of  them  yet,  faded  and  old  and  full  of 
family  history,  most  of  which  was  not  so  im- 
portant as  it  seemed  to  the  builders.  In  the 
little  towns  that  you  pass  on  the  trolley  and  the 
Camden  and  Amboy  road,  there  is  a  certain 
Eighteenth  Century  somnolence,  and  a  dingy 
pride  of  priority.  They  sleep  on,  as  if  it  were 
creditable  not  to  be  busy.  Bordentown,  a  few 
minutes'  ride  from  Trenton,  sits  complacent 
amid  its  memories  of  the  Bonapartes.  It  is 
there  you  change  for  Roebling. 

ROEBLING,  THE  TOWN 
A  STORY  IN  ITSELF 

Roebling — the  town,  not  the  plant — to  which 
some  attention  has  been  given,  is  a  story  in 
itself.  It  is  an  industrial  disturbance  in  the 

[122] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

quietude  of  a  sleepy  and  beauteous  country. 
It  is  a  rattler  of  the  dry  bones  of  tradition,  and 
pretty  nearly  the  last  word  in  corporation 
communities.  Roebling  maintains  no  staff  of 
highbrow  sociologists  to  discuss  the  things  capital 
should  do  in  order  to  make  labor's  pathway 
broad  and  bright.  There's  a  town  superin- 
tendent to  look  after  things  and  he  earns  his 
pay. 

BUILT  TO  MAKE 
WIRE  AND  ROPE 

The  town  of  Roebling  was  built  to  help  along 
the  making  of  wire  and  the  wire  rope.  Making 
good  rope,  it  is  a  good  town,  without  any  fanci- 
ful notions  about  "welfare  work."  The  Dela- 
ware, flowing  by  in  its  beauty,  accounts  for  part 
of  this.  But  to  the  Roeblings  the  Delaware 
means  plentiful  water  supply  and  river  trans- 
portation. To  the  workmen  in  the  big  mills 
which  lie  just  at  the  back  of  the  town,  and  to 
their  families,  which  grow  phenomenally,  it 
means  bathing,  boating,  a  cool  breeze  on  stifling 
midsummer  nights,  and  a  panorama  that  never 
ceases  to  be  lovely. 

In  both  the  city  plants,  as  business  grew, 
building  followed  building.  A  compact  and 
populous  section  had  grown  up  at  Trenton. 

[123] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

More  buildings  could  not  be  crowded  into  the 
original  ground  space.  More  land  was  needed, 
and  as  usual  in  such  cases,  men  with  land  to  sell 
all  along  to  the  south  of  the  Upper  Works,  saw 
the  company's  need  and  had  a  brain  storm 
about  what  the  footage  was  worth. 

The  Roeblings  tried  a  little  farther  down 
stream.  But  down  stream  didn't  mean  down 
price.  So  they  made  a  clean  job  of  it.  Ten  miles 
down  the  river  was  a  little  old  station  called 
Kinkora,  where  the  real  estate  infection  had  not 
appeared.  There  was  land  well  up  above  high 
water,  and  plenty  of  it.  The  Delaware  was  very 
cheap  down  there,  as  compared  with  Trenton 
city  water  rates,  to  a  concern  that  used  as  much 
water  as  all  the  rest  of  the  city  put  together. 

A  LIKELY  PLACE 
FOR  A  WIRE  MILL 

It  was  a  likely  place  for  a  wire  mill,  but  if  a 
dozen  strangers  had  struck  Kinkora  on  the 
same  evening  the  town  would  have  had  trouble 
to  find  beds  for  them  all.  It  meant  twenty 
miles  rail  travel  a  day  for  the  workmen  to  live 
in  Trenton.  So  the  Roeblings  decided  to  build. 
Charles  G.  Roebling  was  then  alive.  The  new 

[124] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

site  and  the  planning  and  building  of  the  town 
were  his  charge.  But,  again,  they  didn't  go 
looking  for  any  welfare  engineers.  The  whole 
job  of  planning  plant  and  town  alike  was  done 
in  the  long  engineering  room  of  the  Roebling 
offices.  At  first  they  called  the  plant  the 
Kinkora.  They  do  yet,  off  and  on,  but  the 
mills  were  a  little  below  the  station,  and  when 
the  new  venture  was  well  under  way,  and  the 
machinery  had  begun  to  squeeze  out  wire,  and 
perhaps  a  hundred  brick  houses  of  various 
types  had  been  erected,  the  place  had  to  have 
a  station  of  its  own.  The  Pennsylvania  Rail- 
road said  it  was  Roebling,  and  stamped  the 
tickets  that  way.  Kinkora  is  wearing  off. 
It  is  still  a  sleepy  little  station  just  up  the  line. 
Between  it  and  Roebling  there  are  a  mile  or  so 
of  distance  and  a  whole  century  of  time. 

The  name  "Kinkora"  harks  back  to  the  year 
1000,  when  King  "Brian  Boru"  of  Ireland  lost 
his  life  at  the  battle  of  Clontarf.  His  palace 
was  named  "Kinkora."  In  1836  an  ambitious 
Irishman  named  Rockefeller  (not  John  D.) 
conceived  the  idea  of  an  air  line  railroad  from 
this  spot  where  Roebling  now  stands  to  Atlantic 
City.  In  fond  remembrance  of  Erin's  Isle  he 
named  the  terminus  on  the  Delaware  "Kinkora." 

[125] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

The  enterprise  itself  died  an  early  death. 

The  Roebling  Company  has  more  than  200 
acres  of  land  in  the  new  settlement,  enough, 
in  all  conscience,  to  accommodate  as  big  a  busi- 
ness as  almost  anyone  would  want  to  do,  and 
houses  to  shelter  all  its  workmen.  If  the  com- 
pany should  ever  find  it  good  business  to  shake 
the  dust  of  Trenton  from  its  shoes  altogether 
it  certainly  has  a  place  to  go. 

NO  TIME  TO  LET 
THE  GRASS  GROW 

From  the  day  when  the  thing  was  decided 
on,  no  grass  grew  under  anybody's  feet.  There 
was  sand  along  that  bucolic  and  undeveloped 
river  bank,  sand  that  ran  well  back,  getting 
more  and  more  like  loam  as  you  left  the  river. 
It  was  broken  and  uneven.  The  freshets  of 
centuries  had  left  hollows  here  and  hummocks 
there.  They  were  levelled.  The  knolls — dunes 
they  would  call  them  along  Lake  Michigan — 
were  scraped  down  and  dumped  into  the 
swales,  and  the  excess  was  thrown  into  a  sedgy 
morass  along  the  river  front,  to  make  it  into 
solid  ground  and  give  a  clean,  healthy  shore, 
which  is  now  one  of  the  chief  charms  of  the 
place.  For  the  sections  where  grass  was  meant 
to  grow  —  for  dooryards  and  the  like — tons 

[126] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

upon  tons  of  "top  soil"  were  brought  in  to  give 
a  fertile  surface. 

The  mill  buildings  went  up  first,  on  a  broad 
space  of  one  hundred  acres  levelled  off  for  them, 
and  then  the  town  began  to  grow.  That  was 
sixteen  years  ago,  and  it  has  kept  on  growing. 
Every  year  sees  a  lot  of  new  houses,  of  various 
values,  and  one  and  all  well  built  and  comely. 
And  in  all  grades  they  are  better  houses  than 
a  workman,  or  a  mill  boss  either,  can  get  any- 
where else  in  America  for  the  same  money. 

TO  MAKE  A  PROFIT 
BUT  TO  SHOW  A  SAVING 

That  has  been  the  doctrine  from  the  begin- 
ning. Charles  G.  Roebling  said  at  the  time 
something  to  the  effect  that  every  workingman 
was  a  free  moral  agent,  and  didn't  want  to  be 
tied  to  anybody's  apron-strings,  that  he  wanted 
a  square  deal  and  a  chance  to  live  his  own  life 
out  of  business  hours,  and  to  get  the  worth  of 
his  money  when  he  spent  it.  "We  purpose," 
he  said,  "to  make  a  fair  profit  on  our  invest- 
ment, but  we  can  do  that  and  still  show  a  man 
a  saving.  And  we  stop  there." 

It  doesn't  take  long  to  realize  that  the 
Roeblings  are  living  up  to  the  original  schedule. 
The  rents,  the  figures  on  all  sorts  of  commodi- 

[127] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

ties  at  the  "village  store,"  which  sells  every- 
thing from  a  pork  chop  to  a  piano,  and  the  drug 
store,  which  is  just  as  "Riker-Hegeman"  as  any 
live  town  could  wish,  are  all  below  the  current 
price  scale  in  the  rest  of  the  country,  by  a 
margin  sufficient  to  mean  something  to  a  family 
when  they  "tote  up"  at  the  year's  end. 

Electric  light,  coal  and  the  other  things  a 
man  has  to  pay  for  in  any  town  are  charged 
for  here,  but  it  doesn't  take  a  legislative  fight 
or  a  big  row  in  the  newspapers  to  keep  the 
price  down  where  a  man  can  afford  to  pay  it. 
Water  is  supplied  free.  The  idea  is  that  the 
man  owes  the  company  nothing  but  good  work 
in  return  for  his  pay.  After  quitting  time  he's 
his  own  boss.  The  company  tries  to  make  life 
in  the  town  pleasant  enough  so  that  he'll  be 
glad  to  live  there,  and  think  he  has  a  good  job. 
And  it  recognizes  that  life  has  many  sides. 

AND  THE  TOWN 
HAD  A  BAR 

It  was  in  pursuance  of  the  general  thesis  that 
when  the  town  opened  it  had  a  hotel  with  a  bar. 
"There's  no  use,"  they  said,  "in  trying  to  make  a 
mollycoddle  out  of  a  mill  man.  When  he  wants 
a  drink  he's  going  to  get  it,  especially  the  foreign 
born.  We  don't  propose  to  pick  his  drinks  for 

[128] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

him.  If  he  wants  whiskey  it's  a  good  sight 
better  for  us  that  he  should  be  able  to  get  it 
here  like  a  human  being  than  to  trail  into 
Trenton  and  take  a  chance  with  the  stuff  that 
goes  over  the  bars  where  a  workingman  drinks. 
The  whiskey  here  isn't  gilt-edged,  but  it's 
decent,  and  it's  worth  what  it  costs." 

Prohibition  settled  the  drink  question,  but 
while  the  cafe  lasted  in  Roebling  it  kept  the 
men  from  going  to  town  to  battle  with  the 
"embalming  fluid,"  and  not  showing  up  for  the 
customary  three  days.  That  too  was  good 
business. 

FIRE,  POLICE,  BANKS, 
STREETS 

After  the  dirt  and  noise  and  disorder  of  a 
city  street,  it  is  like  a  sedative  to  slip  from  the 
train  into  the  peace  and  the  wide  spaces  of 
Roebling.  The  tidy  station  is  at  one  side, 
at  the  other,  beyond  the  switch  tracks,  the 
little  gate-house  which  gives  ingress  to  the 
mill  enclosure — if  you  have  the  proper  kind  of 
pass.  From  here  a  trim  concrete  walk  leads  on 
past  the  ground  of  the  plant  and  its  fence  of 
tall  pickets,  toward  the  river,  and  the  town. 
As  you  go,  you  meet  with  courtesy.  It  is  not 
drawing  the  long  bow  to  say  everybody  in 

[129] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

Roebling — outwardly  at  least — is  civil  and  good 
natured.  Just  beyond  the  mill  grounds  you 
come  upon  the  police  office,  with  trig  coppers 
who  seem  to  have  very  little  to  do.  Like 
the  shining  fire  engines,  which  stand  in  the 
adjoining  building  ready  for  service  either  in 
town  or  plant,  they  seem  to  be  maintained 
chiefly  for  insurance  and  ornament.  But  they 
are  practical  organizations  at  that.  The  Roebling 
Company  learned  what  fire  was  during  the 
war,  when  two  of  the  biggest  buildings  in  the 
Upper  Works  were  destroyed. 

From  this  point  the  streets  lead  away,  broad, 
clean  streets  with  the  best  of  sidewalks,  and 
drainage.  The  town  has  spread  out  now  so 
that  it  looks  no  more  like  a  toy  city.  The 
streets  are  80  feet  wide,  with  the  exception  of 
Main  Street  and  Fifth  Avenue,  which  are  100 
feet  wide.  Trees  have  been  planted  which 
already  make  it  attractive.  In  front  of  every 
house  is  a  dooryard,  a  patch  of  green  grass  to 
remind  a  man  that  God  made  the  world. 

HOUSES 

Adjoining  fire  and  police  houses,  there  was 
formerly  a  trim  little  bank  whose  business  has 
expanded  to  such  an  extent  that  it  has  been 
enabled  to  move  to  the  centre  of  the  business 

[130] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

section  of  the  town  in  an  attractive  and  up-to- 
date  building  of  its  own. 

The  houses,  while  of  widely  different  types,  are 
for  the  most  part  made  of  brick.  In  order  to 
avoid  fire  danger,  the  minimum  of  wood  is  used  in 
all  the  buildings  of  the  town.  The  houses  are 
all  constructed  on  the  most  improved  plan  of 
sanitation  and  hygiene.  Through  the  block, 
giving  access  to  the  back-doors,  run  clean 
alleys,  wide  enough  to  allow  wagons  to  pass 
for  the  delivery  of  coal,  foodstuffs  and  other 
commodities,  and  for  the  collection  of  waste. 
The  company  is  now  halting  between  the  erec- 
tion of  an  incinerator  plant  to  consume  the 
garbage  for  its  700  and  odd  homes,  or  a  "hog 
farm"  as  part  of  its  three  or  four  hundred  acres, 
which  without  difficulty  could  turn  out  1,000 
to  2,000  head  of  swine  a  year,  and  further  reduce 
the  cost  of  living.  It  is  possible,  too,  that  it 
may  some  day  produce  its  own  milk. 

There  is  a  marked  difference  between  some  of 
the  houses  first  erected  and  those  of  more  recent 
construction.  At  present  the  "bungalow"  type 
is  in  great  favor,  since  it  facilitates  the  labor  of 
housekeeping.  More  pretentious  dwellings,  for 
the  men  holding  important  positions  in  the 
plant,  are  sufficient  to  make  a  rent-ridden, 

[131] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

janitor-jaded,  bell-boy  bossed  New  Yorker 
wonder  what  he  is  being  punished  for.  One 
handsome  colonial  home  just  built  for  a 
superintendent  in  one  of  the  wire  mills  would 
be  a  credit  to  any  commuter  town. 

BASEBALL,  RECREATION  BUILDING, 
THEATRE,  BALLROOM 

Always  as  you  pass  through  airy  Roebling 
you  encounter  some  new  institution  built  to 
make  it  seem  like  a  regular  place.  There  is 
a  baseball  ground  which  would  be  a  credit  to 
any  city,  with  its  tidy  green  grandstand  and 
its  carefully  manicured  diamond.  The  Wire 
Works  team  is  now  prominent  in  one  of  the 
State  Leagues.  There  is  a  recreation  building, 
with  billiard  and  pool  tables  and  the  best 
bowling  alleys  that  can  be  built.  There  is  a 
spacious  assembly  hall,  with  theatre  stage  and 
a  scrumptious  curtain  bearing  a  picture  of  the 
Roebling  Brooklyn  Bridge.  The  gallery  is 
commodious.  The  seats  are  removable,  leaving 
a  ballroom  of  impressive  size,  and  adjoining 
rooms  are  equipped  with  ranges,  refrigerators 
and  dishes  for  the  preparation  and  service  of 
suppers  or  of  dinners  great  and  small. 

Take  notice  of  the  hotel,  the  boarding  houses 
where  single  men  live  well  and  cheaply,  of  the 

[132] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

public  school,  the  hospital,  the  doctors,  the 
nurses,  the  dispensary.  And  these  last  are 
busy  functionaries. 

VERY  LITTLE  SICKNESS 
VERY  MANY  BABIES 

There  is  very  little  sickness  in  Roebling. 
The  sanitation  is  studiously  good,  but  when 
you  are  sick  there  they  look  after  you,  which 
is  also  "good  business,"  and  babies  are  a 
favorite  form  of  diversion.  This  is  impressively 
true.  You  sense  it  wherever  you  go.  There 
are  children  everywhere — good  looking  whole- 
some "kids."  And  something  makes  them  glad 
to  live  here,  too. 

BEING  A  BOY  SCOUT 
AT  ROEBLING 

To  be  a  boy  scout  in  Roebling  is  about  as 
good  fun  as  a  boy  could  have.  For  a  long  time 
the  company  gave  the  boys  too  much.  Then 
it  woke  up  to  the  fact  that  half  the  sport  of 
being  a  boy  scout  was  to  do  things.  So  the 
Scouts  were  told  if  they  wanted  to  keep  the 
perfectly  corking  club  house  on  the  river  bank, 
with  its  big  meeting  room,  its  open  mouthed 
fireplace,  its  mounted  deer  heads,  and  banners, 
and  books  and  guns  and  spears  and  swords  and 
all  the  other  junk  the  boy  soul  loves,  they'd 

[133] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

have  to  work  for  it.  Goodness  knows  they  do. 
The  grounds  around  that  shack  in  spring  are 
turned  up  like  a  golf  links.  What  they  have 
done  in  the  way  of  white  birch  rustic  railings 
along  the  winding  walks  that  lead  to  the  grounds 
would  make  a  Chippewa  Indian  sick  with  envy. 
This  year  they  are  to  help  build  a  long  float 
from  the  club  house  to  the  water,  to  launch 
their  canoes  on. 

To  the  medical  equipment  is  added  a 
hospital  for  contagious  diseases,  standing  away 
out  in  the  fields.  And  in  the  outskirts  also  is 
land  set  apart  for  gardens,  where  the  mill- 
workers  have  allotted  plots  of  ground  for  the 
raising  of  their  own  vegetables.  The  manure 
from  the  stables,  where  sixty  horses  are  kept, 
helps  to  make  gardening  worth  while.  Even 
to  be  a  mule  in  Roebling  is  comfortable.  There 
are  old  mules  there — you  see  them  just  wander- 
ing around  the  paddocks,  eating  and  growing 
older — that  will  never  see  thirty-five  or  forty 
again.  Nobody  ever  will  send  them  down  the 
long  trail.  They  have  worked  hard  for  the 
Roebling  Company.  It  will  feed  them  till 
they  simply  lie  down  and  die  of  their  own  accord. 

Feeding — whether  mules  or  people— is  habi- 
tual. When  John  A.  Roebling  first  made  rope, 

[134] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

he  had  three  or  four  men  working  with  him. 
They  had  a  table  in  the  shop.  As  the  business 
has  grown,  this  custom  has  continued.  Today 
the  entire  office  force  at  the  headquarters  in 
Trenton — some  230  persons  of  all  ranks — gets 
a  dinner  every  day  that  for  sheer  quality  cannot 
be  equalled  in  any  of  the  city  hotels.  It  may 
be  a  fad  to  feed  that  whole  crowd  fresh  yellow 
cream  brought  in  every  morning  from  the 
Roebling  farms,  but — it's  good  business. 

THE  PARK 

The  high  land  on  the  bluff  overlooking  the 
river  at  Roebling  is  a  park,  with  trees  and 
benches,  and  a  place  where  the  band  can  play 
while  the  folks  sit  taking  the  air  on  a  hot 
summer  night.  In  a  neat  enclosure  of  Roebling 
wire,  convenient  to  all  parts  of  the  town,  are 
tennis  courts,  for  general  use.  There  is  a  sani- 
tary barber  shop,  where  five  shining  chairs  are 
always  full.  Roebling  has  the  best  barbered 
lot  of  foreign-born  workmen  in  America. 

HOW  THE  FOREIGNER 
LIVES  IN  ROEBLING 

In  a  town  like  this  are  lessons  for  those  who 
like  to  try  to  translate  the  foreigner  for  the  good 
of  American  industry.  There  are  those  who 

[135] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

cherish  a  superstition  that  the  foreign  work- 
man in  the  United  States  lives  poorly.  In 
Roebling  it  is  remarked  that  it  is  the  foreigner 
who  is  the  best  customer  in  groceries  and 
butcher's  meat.  He  buys  chickens  instead  of 
beef  brisket,  and  not  one  chicken,  but  two  and 
three.  It  is  he  also  who  buys  the  Hood  River 
apples  and  the  best  grape  fruit. 

And  as  for  bread — you  should  see  the  bakery. 
"Sunny  Jim"  would  sing  to  see  it — clean  and  shin- 
ing, and  turning  out  all  kinds  of  bakestuffs  besides 
the  big  round  red-blond  loaves  of  "European 
bread,"  which  they  say  "has  the  strength"  in 
it.  The  baker's  wagon,  loaded  to  the  very  top 
of  the  canvas  cover,  goes  through  the  town 
and  the  workers'  little  children  run  homeward 
from  it  with  two,  three,  four  loaves  altogether 
as  big  as  themselves.  Crescent  rolls,  which 
cost  a  nickel  at  a  French  bakery  in  New  York, 
are  sold  here  for  two  cents  apiece. 

So  it  goes  in  Roebling.  Over  on  the  one  side 
are  the  negro  quarters.  They  have  everything 
anybody  else  has  including  a  recreation  house 
— and  when  they  recreate,  they  just  recreate. 


If  Roebling  was  an  experiment,  it  is  not  so 
any  longer.     It  is  full  of  comfortable  people, 

[136] 


OUTSPINNING         THE         SPIDER 

and  in  seventy  years  the  Roebling  theory  as 
to  what  a  workman  wants  and  how  he  should 
be  treated  has  never  proved  itself  more  con- 
clusively than  here.  It  is  a  suggestive  fact 
that  in  all  that  time,  save  for  some  insignifi- 
cant incidents,  the  Roeblings  have  been  free 
from  the  nightmare  of  "labor  troubles."  It 
may  be  because  its  workmen  have  nothing  worth 
while  to  complain  of.  Every  effort  is  made  to 
make  them  comfortable  without  making  them 
feel  like  dependents. 

It  is  the  outworking  of  a  great  business  theory. 
In  these  times  it  is  of  impressive  significance. 


1137] 


7  DAY  USE 

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